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 MapQuest Geocoding is live
MapQuest Geocoding has been part of plenty of long-running applications, some of which have not touched their location lookup code in years because it simply keeps working. Our compatibility host is built for exactly that situation: code that works fine, that nobody wants to rewrite, but that a team would still like to move off an aging integration without a rebuild.
The host reproduces MapQuest's request parameters and response body exactly, aside from copyright, terms and privacy text, which is ours rather than the original provider's. A request currently shaped for MapQuest's geocoding endpoints can be sent to our host as is, and the response returned parses the same way existing code already expects it to.
The only changes needed are a host name and a key. That key authenticates using whichever of our four standard methods matches your current integration: an X-API-Key header, an Authorization: Bearer header, HTTP Basic auth with the key as the username, or a query parameter.
Getting that key does not require finishing account verification first. A newly registered account's keys work through a grace period before My Geocode requires the sign up email to be confirmed, after which unverified keys pause rather than fail outright. That matters for exactly this kind of migration test, where someone wants to point a legacy integration at a new host on a Friday afternoon without waiting on an email round trip.
Pricing follows the same structure as everywhere else on My Geocode. Any address gets 2,500 free requests a day with no key at all, counted per network. A key adds its own separate 2,500 free requests a day. Past those allowances, prepaid credit is €0.0001 a request, or an Unlimited package covers usage for €50 a month, with no difference in rate between this host and any other.
Every response carries the same quota headers as the rest of the platform: X-Quota-Limit, X-Quota-Used, X-Quota-Free-Remaining, X-Quota-Network-Used, X-Credits-Remaining, X-Key-IPs-Used, X-Key-IPs-Limit and X-Quota-Reset. Two of those, X-Key-IPs-Used and X-Key-IPs-Limit, track something specific to keys rather than networks: each key is allowed a small, rolling number of IP addresses it can be called from, which keeps a key from being shared across an unrelated fleet of servers while still tolerating a normal deploy that changes an application's outbound address.
For projects that want more than the compatible response returns, mg_extras=1 on the request, or an X-MG-Extras header, adds optional fields on top of the standard shape, entirely opt in.
Documentation for the host is at /compatibility/mapquest/, with a broader look at compatibility across the platform at /docs/compatibility/. If MapQuest Geocoding is still sitting quietly in your stack, this is a low-cost way to see what a modern quota structure looks like underneath the same familiar shape.