Rate limits should be documented, not discovered
Finding your rate limit through a 429 error in production is not documentation. It is a support ticket that should never have needed to exist.
Opinion on the location data business: pricing, lock-in, privacy, and what the big providers get wrong.
Finding your rate limit through a 429 error in production is not documentation. It is a support ticket that should never have needed to exist.
A batch call with a thousand addresses still does a thousand separate lookups. Counting it as one request would just hide where the real usage actually went.
A proprietary field name or a custom object model saves a provider nothing and costs a customer a rewrite later. Plain, predictable JSON is not a missing feature.
A trial ends and asks for a credit card on a fixed schedule. A keyless tier just keeps working. We think the second one respects a developer's time more.
Real applications mix geocoding, IP lookups, and time zone calls in a single request path. Billing them as separate products ignores how they are used together.
Time zone lookups run on a public, actively maintained data source. Charging a separate premium for that lookup does not reflect a real added cost.
An SDK asks you to trust one company's client library for the life of your project. A compatibility host asks you to change one line of configuration.
Unlimited is supposed to mean no cap. Read the fine print on many unlimited API plans and you will often find a fair use policy that quietly says otherwise.
A per-request price matches what an API actually costs to run. Seat pricing measures headcount, not usage, and geocoding traffic rarely follows either.
Only Our takes, as it is published.
Subscribe to Our takes