When I created the NUKEMAP in 2012, the Google Maps API was amazing. It was the best thing in town for creating Javascript mapping mash-ups, cost literally nothing, had an active developer community that added new features on a regular basis, and actually seemed like it was interested in people using their product to develop cool, useful tools.
Today, pretty much all of that is now untrue. The API codebase has stagnated in terms of actually useful features being added (many neat features have been removed or quietly deprecated; the new features being added are generally incremental and lame), which is really quite remarkable given that the Google Maps stand-alone website (the one you visit when you go to Google Maps to look up a map or location) has had a lot of neat features added to it (like its 3-D mode) that have not been ported to the API code (which is why NUKEMAP3D is effectively dead — Google deprecated the Google Earth Plugin and has never replaced it, and no other code base has filled the gap).
But more importantly, the changes to the pricing model that have been recently put in place are, to put it lightly, insane, and punishing if you are an educational web developer that builds anything that people actually find useful.
NUKEMAP gets around 15,000 hits a day on a slow day, and around 200,000 hits a day per month, and has done this consistently for over 5 years (and it occasionally has spikes of several hundred thousand page views per day, when it goes viral for whatever reason). While that’s pretty impressive for an academic’s website, it’s what I would call “moderately popular” by Internet terms. I don’t think this puts the slightest strain on Google’s servers (who also run, like, all of YouTube). And from 2012 through 2016, Google didn’t charge a thing for this. Which was pretty generous, and perhaps unsustainable. But it encouraged a lot of experimentation, and something like NUKEMAP wouldn’t exist without that.
In 2016, they started charging. It wasn’t too bad — at most, my bill was around $200 a month. Even that is pretty hard to do out-of-pocket, but I’ve had the good fortune to be associated with an institution (my employers, the College of Arts and Letters at the Stevens Institute of Technology) that was willing to foot the bill.
But in 2018, Google changes its pricing model, and my bill jumped to more like $1,800 per month. As in, over $20,000 a year. Which is several times my main hosting fees (for all of my websites).
I reached out to Google to find out why this was. Their new pricing sheet is… a little hard to make sense of. Which is sort of why I didn’t see this coming. They do have a “pricing calculator,” though, that lets you see exactly how terrible the pricing scheme is, though it is a little tricky to find and requires having a Google account to access. But if you start playing with the “dynamic map loads” button (there are other charges, but that’s the big one) you can see how expensive it gets, quickly. I contacted Google for help in figuring all this out, and they fobbed me off onto a non-Google “valued partner” who was licensed to deal with corporations on volume pricing. Hard pass, sorry.
I know that Google in theory supports people using their products for “social causes,” and if one is at a non-profit (as I am), you can apply for a “grant” to defray the costs, assuming Google assume’s you’re doing good. I don’t know how they feel about the NUKEMAP, but in any case, it doesn’t matter: people at educational institutions (even not-for-profit ones, like mine) are disqualified from applying. Why? Because Google wants to capture the educational market in a revenue-generating way, and so directs you to their Google for Education site, which as you will quickly find is based on a very different sort of model. There’s no e-mail contact on the site, as an aside: you have to claim you are representing an entire educational institution (I am not) and that you are interested in implementing Google’s products on your campus (I am not), and if you do all this (as I did, just to get through to them) you can finally talk to them a bit.
There is literally nothing on the website that suggests there is any way to get Google Maps API credit, but they do have a way to request discounted access to the Google Cloud Platform, which appears to be some kind of machine-learning platform, and after sending an e-mail they did say that you could apply for Google Cloud Platform funds to be used for Google Maps API.
By which point I had already, in my heart, given up on Google. It’s just not worth it. Let me outline the reasons:
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