Warning signs you are locked into a proprietary format
Vendor lock-in around a geocoding response format creeps in gradually. Here are the specific warning signs worth watching for.
Tag
#vendor-lock-in
Why migration should take an afternoon, not a quarter
If switching a location API takes a quarter, the previous integration was designed to make leaving expensive, whether or not that was the stated intention.
Why open data beats licensed data for most use cases
Licensed data comes with a contract that can change under you. Open data comes with a community that has no reason to renegotiate your access later.
The quiet cost of vendor lock-in
Lock-in rarely shows up as a single bad decision. It shows up as a hundred small ones that quietly make leaving cost far more than simply staying put.
The case against proprietary response formats
A proprietary field name or a custom object model saves a provider nothing and costs a customer a rewrite later. Plain, predictable JSON is not a missing feature.