Migrating a Zapier or Make automation to a new geocoding host
No-code automations built on a geocoding step need a different migration approach than custom code does. Here is how to handle that switch.
Migrating from Open-Elevation
Open-Elevation is an open source project built around a simple idea: send an array of latitude and longitude pairs, get back an array of elevation values in meters. It is commonly self-hosted, either against the project's public demo instance for light use or on private infrastructure loaded with a chosen elevation dataset for anything more serious. That simplicity in the request format is genuinely one of its strengths, and any migration worth doing should keep it.
Self-hosting comes with real maintenance costs that are easy to underestimate at the start: elevation datasets take meaningful disk space, the server needs to stay up, and updates to the underlying data are a manual project rather than something that happens automatically. A team that set this up early in a project's life sometimes finds, a year or two later, that the maintenance burden outweighs the reason they chose self-hosting in the first place.
My Geocode runs elevation lookups as a fully working endpoint, not a shape-only compatibility layer, since this is one of the lookups where real results can be shown directly. A request for a coordinate pair returns the ground elevation at that point in meters, drawn from our own elevation data rather than requiring you to source, load, and maintain a dataset yourself. Details are at /docs/elevation-lookup/.
For teams moving specifically from Open-Elevation's array-based request and response style, the practical differences are:
- Authentication: Open-Elevation typically requires none for its public instance, while My Geocode uses a key sent as an
X-API-Keyheader,Authorization: Bearer, HTTP Basic auth, or a query parameter (2,500 requests a day work with no key at all) - No server to run, no dataset to download or refresh, and no disk space to provision
- A predictable daily allowance and clear pricing beyond it, rather than the uptime risk of self-managed infrastructure
Beyond the free 2,500 requests a day with no key, and another 2,500 free per key per day counted per network, elevation lookups are priced the same as every other endpoint: prepaid credit at €0.0001 per request or an Unlimited key at €50 a month.
For applications that call elevation as one part of a bigger workflow, hiking or cycling route profiles, drone flight planning, or land survey tools, the request shape stays close enough to what Open-Elevation already expects that this tends to be a small, contained piece of work: swap the endpoint and the authentication, keep the rest.
If self-hosting was chosen originally to avoid ongoing costs entirely rather than for control over the data, it is worth running the actual numbers on your call volume against the free allowance and the per-request rate before deciding, since a lot of elevation lookups in practice stay well within what the free tier alone covers.