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.
Elevation data refreshed for better accuracy in mountainous regions
Flat terrain is forgiving. Elevation data that is slightly out of date barely shows in a response when the ground barely changes over a wide area. Steep terrain is a different story, where a small horizontal shift in a coordinate can mean a real difference in height. We refreshed the elevation data behind /v1/elevation with that specifically in mind.
The endpoint itself has not changed shape. Send a set of coordinates and you get back an elevation figure in meters, the same request and response structure documented at /docs/elevation-lookup/. What changed is the source data underneath, updated to reduce the kind of error that shows up most in mountainous and high-altitude terrain, where older or coarser data tends to smooth over real variation in the landscape.
This matters most for anything that treats elevation as more than a background detail. Route planning that accounts for climb, outdoor and hiking applications that report altitude along a trail, and engineering or agricultural tools that rely on precise ground height all depend on data that reflects terrain closely rather than approximately. A refreshed dataset behind the same endpoint means those use cases get a better answer without touching a single line of integration code.
Batch behavior is unchanged as well. A request carrying many coordinates still counts each one individually, exactly as it always has, and pricing follows the same €0.0001 a request beyond the free allowance, or coverage under an Unlimited package, regardless of how flat or steep the terrain in question happens to be.
This same refreshed data also sits behind our Open-Elevation compatibility host at /compatibility/open-elevation/, so anything already pointed there benefits from the same improvement without any action needed on your end.
We think of elevation accuracy as an ongoing responsibility rather than a one-time task, since terrain data sources themselves improve over time and it is worth passing that improvement along as it becomes available. This refresh is one step in that direction, focused specifically on the regions where accuracy tends to matter most and where older data has historically been weakest.
If elevation figures feed into anything user-facing in your application, from a hiking app's altitude readout to a route planner's climb estimate, this update should be visible as a quiet improvement in accuracy, particularly anywhere the ground is not flat. Full endpoint details remain at /docs/elevation-lookup/.