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.
Moving off a HERE autosuggest integration
HERE's autosuggest endpoint returns address and place suggestions as a user types, structured as an items array where each entry carries a title, a resultType indicating whether the suggestion is a full address, a place, or a category, and often a highlighting object marking which characters matched the input. That mixed result typing, addresses and places and categories together in one response, is one of the more distinctive parts of HERE's approach and something worth mapping out carefully before assuming another provider's autocomplete works identically.
Autosuggest integrations are usually deeply wired into a specific front-end component, an address field with a dropdown, and the interaction details (how quickly suggestions appear, how highlighting is rendered, what happens when a user ignores the suggestions and just keeps typing) tend to matter more to end users than any backend implementation detail. This makes the migration partly a backend task and partly a UX review.
My Geocode provides address autocomplete as documented at /docs/address-autocomplete/, with its own request and response shape. Because result mixing and ranking behavior are genuinely specific to each provider's implementation, it is worth testing this endpoint directly against representative queries from your own user base, rather than assuming the mixed-type result structure from HERE carries over unchanged. Different providers draw a different line between what counts as an address suggestion and what counts as a place.
Steps that tend to work well for this kind of migration:
- Catalog the specific
resultTypevalues your front-end code currently branches on, since that branching logic is the part most likely to need adjustment - Review the highlighting or matched-substring behavior your UI currently renders, and check whether the new endpoint provides an equivalent or whether that particular UI detail needs to be reworked
- Run the new endpoint against a sample of real historical queries from your logs, not synthetic test addresses, since real user typing patterns (typos, partial words, abbreviations) reveal ranking differences that clean test data will not
Authentication uses a key sent as X-API-Key, Authorization: Bearer, HTTP Basic auth, or a query parameter. Pricing is 2,500 free requests a day with no key, 2,500 more free per key per day counted per network, then prepaid credit at €0.0001 per request or an Unlimited key at €50 a month, the same rate across every endpoint on the platform.
Given how frequently autosuggest fires relative to a typical geocoding call, since nearly every keystroke can trigger a request, it is worth estimating volume against your daily free allowance and the per-request rate ahead of a full launch, rather than discovering the real usage pattern only once it is live.