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 OpenStreetMap Nominatim
Nominatim occupies an unusual spot among geocoding options because it is both a piece of open source software you can run yourself and a public demo instance anyone can query directly, governed by a usage policy that expects a descriptive User-Agent header and reasonable request pacing rather than a formal API key. Its JSON response includes a display_name string, a lat and lon pair as strings rather than numbers, and an address object with OpenStreetMap's own tagging conventions like road, suburb, and postcode.
Teams tend to hit a wall with the public instance once their traffic grows past what a shared community resource is meant to absorb, and self-hosting Nominatim is a real option but a heavy one: it requires downloading and importing a large planet or regional OpenStreetMap data extract, keeping that data updated, and running the server infrastructure yourself indefinitely. That tradeoff, infrastructure and maintenance work in exchange for control, is worth being honest about before committing to either path.
My Geocode's Nominatim compatibility host reproduces the display_name, lat, lon, and address field structure exactly, with the copyright, terms, and privacy text being the only content that differs from Nominatim's own output. Reference details are at /compatibility/nominatim/. Code written against the public Nominatim instance, including its string-typed coordinate fields, should parse responses from the compatibility host without changes.
What actually changes in this specific migration:
- No more User-Agent header requirement tied to a shared usage policy; authentication instead uses a key, sent as an
X-API-Keyheader, anAuthorization: Bearerheader, HTTP Basic auth, or a query parameter - A predictable daily allowance instead of an unspecified shared-resource rate limit: 2,500 requests a day free with no key, and another 2,500 free per key per day counted per network
- No infrastructure to run or OpenStreetMap data extract to maintain, since the hosted service handles that
Beyond the free allowance, pricing is prepaid credit at €0.0001 per request or an Unlimited key at €50 a month, and every endpoint, including this compatibility host, is priced the same as every other one on the platform.
For teams that specifically valued Nominatim's foundation in open geographic data, it is worth knowing that field naming built on OpenStreetMap conventions, like suburb and postcode rather than more generic terms, carries over in this compatibility host's structure, so the address vocabulary your code already expects should still make sense on the other side of the migration.