I came so close to getting our app off of Google Maps a few months ago, we'd be saving literally thousands a month. But the "look" of the map from open street map, map tiler, etc was deemed too different and the team was scared it would negatively impact our users. The Maps API is definitely getting worse, and the pricing setup seems like it was cooked up by someone from Microsoft. Also Maplibre and its various wrappers are so much nicer to work it.

I've been following Alex Wellerstein off and on for a few years now, since I discovered that he was a science adviser for a crazed nuclear-history TV series called Manh(a)ttan, so I read this post about NUKEMAP when it originally appeared. I wonder whether the situation with Google Maps is any different now. I'm not a developer, so I don't need to know. I'm just curious.

Wait until someone writes a script doing a loop or auto-refresh and you get charged 100'000 USD. For such, Google is very dangerous (lot of nightmare stories), you have to avoid as much as possible their public API services.

Since then, Open Street Maps is self-hostable and supports all of these calls you'd need to remake this.

And no throwing $1500/month at google for what amounts to 3 colored circles on a map.

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