What we shipped this month: geocoding, IP, time zone and more
A roundup of recent work across the API: new compatibility hosts, faster time zone and elevation lookups, dashboard features, and clearer quota visibility.
Drop-in compatibility with Bing Maps REST Services is live
Plenty of mapping integrations were built years ago against Bing Maps REST Services and have simply kept running since, untouched, because there was never a compelling reason to rewrite them. We think there is now one: a compatible host that takes the same requests and returns the same response shape, at a price and quota structure that is transparent from the first call.
Our Bing Maps REST Services compatibility host mirrors the original service's request parameters and response body exactly, apart from copyright, terms and privacy text, which reflects My Geocode rather than the original provider. Existing code that builds requests in Bing's format, parses responses in Bing's format, or both, can be pointed at our host with no rewrite involved.
Getting there means changing two things: the host name your requests go to, and the key you authenticate with. That key can travel however your integration already expects to send one, as an X-API-Key header, an Authorization: Bearer header, HTTP Basic auth with the key as the username, or a plain query parameter. All four work identically across every My Geocode host, including this one.
The pricing underneath the compatibility layer is the same as anywhere else on the platform. Every address gets 2,500 free requests a day without needing a key at all, counted per network so a shared connection cannot be split across many keys to multiply the free tier. Every key adds its own 2,500 free requests a day on top of that. Past those allowances, usage draws on prepaid credit at €0.0001 a request or an Unlimited package at €50 a month, and that rate holds regardless of which host or endpoint the request went to.
Quota visibility does not disappear just because the response shape matches another provider. Every call still returns X-Quota-Limit, X-Quota-Used, X-Quota-Free-Remaining, X-Quota-Network-Used, X-Credits-Remaining and the rest of our standard header set, so you always know exactly where a given key or network stands, something the original service does not offer in this form.
For teams that want more than the strict compatible response, mg_extras=1 on the request, or an X-MG-Extras header, adds optional fields on top of the standard shape without disturbing it. Leave that flag off entirely and the response is indistinguishable in structure from what the original API would have returned.
Migration guides that walk through moving an existing integration over, endpoint by endpoint, live at /docs/compatibility/, and the host itself is documented at /compatibility/bing-maps/. Testing it costs nothing beyond a spare few minutes and a key.