If your Google Maps invoice makes you sad every month, this blog is worth a read if you want to save hundreds of dollars every month.
Current scenario
Startups and businesses focus on providing the best possible experience to their customers; one solution stack used by almost all consumer brands is Google Maps API. Furthermore, if a business involves last-mile logistics, the relationship with Google Maps appears to be inseparable. Google Maps is free for end-users, but it is not free for businesses.
For example: In the case of B2C apps like Swiggy & Zomato
Each time you search for an address and choose from the auto-complete options, the business is charged ₹1.50. For instance, something may appear to be cheap. Consider the possibility of millions of users, each with several addresses.
Each instance of real-time order tracking costs a business ₹4. How? Google charges the company ₹0.40 each time the rider changes his position, and depending on the pooling interval, the API request is performed at least 10 times on average.
Places and distance matrix are the most commonly utilised APIs for a startup. Places allows the user to search for and add addresses from auto-complete, while the distance matrix is used to calculate the distance and time between two points.
Monopoly of Google
Correlating the name of the location with the exact co-ordinates is best done using the Google platform. That is the best crowdsourced piece of work I have ever seen, thanks to its Google My Business vertical. Because of this massive amount of tagged data, Google outperforms everyone else in the domain when it comes to looking for places.
Each Android phone that uses Google Maps is a data point for traffic prediction, finding new routes, and determining the accuracy of tagged locations and more. All of this becomes easier with millions of Android phones wandering the earth, enhancing Google's accuracy.
When it comes to finding a location, there is practically no alternative to Google Maps. Some firms are attempting to mimic, but the data is only a fraction of what Google possesses.
How can you save cost?
If your application has intensive calculations for calculating distance between two points, determining the shortest way, geo processing for service availability, and more on those notes, the answer is OSRM for distance matrix. You can utilise OSRM, which leverages open source maps and provides almost correct data.
There is, of course, a trade-off, but the savings are worth it from a technical standpoint. If this is done correctly, end users may not even notice.
Use Case: It’s tried and tested for Indian cities
I have implemented this with Yumzy; we had a use case where we wanted to calculate the availability of the restaurant in specific localities based on the user address; this required intensive geodata processing. Yumzy used OSRM to save millions of rupees. It is extremely fast and is built on C++ for routing.
Yumzy used this to analyze data from 25,000 restaurants using a city/locality geo fence. Each restaurant processing will require almost 5000 API calls to the Google Maps API. We saved ₹2,000 for each restaurant's processing.
Links
OSRM : http://project-osrm.org/
API Documentation Link : http://project-osrm.org/docs/v5.24.0/api/#
Comentarios