Ask HN: How many Startups will be strangled by Google Maps’ price hike today?
For those who are unaware, today is the first deadline and milestone for the roll out of Google Maps’ changes to both its API structure and most importantly pricing. All changes will be finalized by July 16th - a date only added after outrage from customers - but these two dates are significant because they are the sounding bell for the death of an era:
The age of Google Maps as an open platform is over.
30 days ago, Google Maps quietly began approaching its clients and provided them with a very simple ultimatum.
Pay us now. Or be cut off from Google Maps.
You can either play ball now and pay marginally less as a percentage or you can realize that within 30 days, it is impossibly difficult for you to transition your product off of Google Maps, and you’ll have no choice but to pay us then anyway.
(oh, and we’ll be charging you a nice premium as well if you wait until the deadline to make your decision)
This bullying tactic was not without teeth, for Google had two cards to play.
First, they marked up prices wherever they could — including some of the more lucrative APIs like geocoding — where a 10x increase in price is now taking effect.
Second, they obliterated their free tier. Under the previous scheme, Startups could utilize up to 25,000 free map loads per day and would only be charged for spikes above that if the usage was sustained for more than 90 days. That free tier has now been reduced by 25x to a paltry 933 a day (28,000 a month - their $200 free credit) with seemingly no protections for virality, data visualization, or random map experimentation.
Welcome to your new annual costs:
2017: $0
2018: $50,000
We are looking at a 10x - 100x increase in price for both their Standard and Business customers. These map load numbers are nothing for places like the US or the EU. This is not including costs for any of its other Maps APIs. That’s not including monetization per market. This is simply trying to draw a basic, interactive map on a web page. It is unclear how emerging markets will handle this transition, but capital they could have used more effectively elsewhere will now have to be spent on Maps.
Beyond map loads, projects utilizing most of the APIs are now preparing for annual bills ranging from $100,000 — $250,000, where previously their costs were 100 times less or even free.
Our co-worker posed the question to Google, “How is a seed-stage startup with $500k in the bank going to survive with these kind of prices?” She replied we should be happy because it’s a defensible advantage for preexisting businesses with revenue. Everyone has to pay so everyone has to deal with the same handicap.
No. That does not make us happy. The complete opposite in fact - it is antagonistic to how SV grew as a software ecosystem and that is nothing to celebrate.
Companies need to make money, but Google already receives a wealth of data and lock-in effect from its Maps API; that same data and product familiarity have made Google incredibly profitable and put Google Maps on every phone. This is very different from spinning up a cloud server that has no consumer-facing component or data awareness. Google now benefits on three different axes from these changes, all while positioning themselves as the victims of exploitation by ride-hailing services, travel sites, restaurant recommendation engines, and more.
I’ve admired Google and its culture since the early 2000’s when findfast’s metasearch made it abundantly clear how much better Google search was. Their contributions to open source and open source culture have been better than most over the years. I’ve been an evangelist for their products both outside and inside the various organizations I’ve worked for, pushing GCP as a legitimate contender to AWS, but this…
This daylight hold-up has left a real sour taste in my mouth.
It’s reminded me that a corporation is not a person. As the members of a corporation change, correspondingly, so too will the corporation’s actions. The ladder is real and there are those that upon reaching the top will kick down anyone else right behind them. Google easily could have mitigated this situation by linearly scaling pricing over time or giving a reasonable timeline for these changes, but they didn’t. Regardless of what happens moving forward, the lack of empathy for their customers and ecosystem signals a shift in Google’s attitude toward Silicon Valley startups. Experimentation and early-stage Startups need not apply.
(Previous thread that didn’t receive enough attention: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17093190)
