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 Google Maps Platform is live
Google Maps Platform is one of the most widely integrated geocoding services in existence, which also makes it one of the hardest to move away from. Rewriting request builders and response parsers across a codebase just to try another provider is rarely worth the engineering time it costs. So we built a host that does not ask you to rewrite anything.
Our Google Maps Platform compatibility host reproduces the request parameters and response structure of the original service exactly, aside from copyright, terms and privacy text, which is ours. Whatever your integration currently sends to Google's geocoding endpoints, it can send to ours instead. Switching providers becomes a matter of changing a host name and a key, not a development project.
This sits alongside our own native endpoints. If you are starting fresh, /v1/forward, /v1/reverse, /v1/autocomplete and /v1/postcode are documented at /docs/ and give you our request shape directly. If you already have code written against Google's format, the compatibility host at /compatibility/google-maps/ lets you keep it as is.
Authentication works the same flexible way it does across all of My Geocode: send your key as an X-API-Key header, an Authorization: Bearer header, HTTP Basic auth with the key as the username, or a query parameter. Whichever pattern your existing client library already uses for Google's API, one of these four will match it, so the authentication code in your integration rarely needs to change either.
Pricing on the compatibility host is the same as everywhere else on My Geocode. Every key gets 2,500 free requests a day, on top of the 2,500 a day available from any address without a key at all, counted per network. Past that, prepaid credit runs at €0.0001 a request, or an Unlimited package covers everything for €50 a month. There is no separate, higher rate for using a compatibility host instead of a native endpoint. Every endpoint and every drop-in host costs the same.
Every response also carries the same quota headers as the rest of the API, X-Quota-Limit, X-Quota-Used, X-Quota-Free-Remaining, X-Credits-Remaining and the rest, giving you visibility into usage that a straight swap of providers would not otherwise offer for free.
If your integration needs more than the standard response, adding mg_extras=1 to a request, or the X-MG-Extras header, layers in optional extra fields such as ground elevation on top of the compatible shape. That is entirely additive: leave it off, and the response matches the original provider's format precisely.
Trying this out takes minutes, not a sprint. Point a test call at /compatibility/google-maps/ with a fresh key, and compare the response to what you already get today.