Verifying an address matches its stated postal code before checkout
A mismatched postal code and city on an order form looks like a small typo until it turns into a delivery sent to the wrong part of the country entirely.
Building a solar panel siting tool using elevation
A full solar site assessment involves an engineer visiting the property, checking roof orientation, shading from nearby structures and trees, and the specific slope of the roof itself, a process that takes real time and cost per visit, and a residential solar installer was scheduling a meaningful number of these visits for properties that turned out, once an engineer actually looked, to be poor candidates for solar for reasons that a much simpler check could have flagged in advance.
Elevation and terrain context, while not a complete replacement for an in-person shading and roof survey, gave the installer a useful early filter. /v1/elevation returned ground elevation for a property's coordinates and for points around it, which the installer's team used to get a rough sense of the surrounding terrain, whether a property sat in a valley likely to face more shading from nearby higher ground, or on relatively flat or elevated terrain with fewer obvious obstructions from the landscape itself, separate from the question of trees or nearby buildings that only an actual site photo or visit could assess.
The installer built this into its initial online quote request form as a lightweight pre-screening step: a homeowner entered their address, which the system geocoded to get coordinates, and elevation data for that point along with a small grid of surrounding points gave a rough terrain profile that fed into an early estimate of solar viability, clearly labeled as preliminary and explicitly not a substitute for the full site assessment that would still happen before any installation was scheduled.
This did not eliminate site visits, since terrain is only one factor among several, and plenty of properties with fine terrain still turn out to be poor candidates because of tree cover or roof condition, details elevation data cannot see. What it did was help the installer prioritize which quote requests to schedule a site visit for first, and occasionally set more realistic expectations with a homeowner upfront when the terrain profile suggested real difficulty, like a property tucked into a steep, shaded valley, that would likely limit solar viability regardless of roof condition.
The installer also used ground elevation as an optional extra field on some of its other location lookups, since My Geocode's optional extras, available with mg_extras=1 or the X-MG-Extras header, include ground elevation alongside the coordinates it was already resolving for other parts of its quoting workflow, letting the installer pull elevation context without a fully separate call for cases where it only needed a quick additional data point rather than a full terrain grid.
The installer was careful in its marketing and quote materials not to overstate what this early check could promise, framing it consistently as a preliminary screening tool rather than a final assessment, which mattered both for setting realistic homeowner expectations and for avoiding any claim that could be read as a firm energy production estimate before an actual engineer had looked at the property.
Volume was low, tied to quote request volume rather than to anything more frequent, comfortably inside the free daily allowance for an installer of regional size. Documentation for the endpoint and the extras fields is at /docs/elevation-lookup/.