The trouble with API keys that never expire
A key issued years ago, never rotated, and still valid today is not a convenience. It is a liability nobody has actually looked at in years.
Why elevation data gets treated as an afterthought
Elevation data has an image problem in this industry more than a technical one. It gets framed as a nice-to-have, a flourish added to a map view or a flight planning tool, rather than as data that genuine, practical applications actually depend on: flood risk assessment, drainage planning, agricultural work, aviation clearance calculations, construction site evaluation. None of these are niche uses. All of them need ground elevation to be treated with the same seriousness as a coordinate or an address, not as a decorative extra bolted onto a mapping product.
We built elevation as a real endpoint with its own place in the product, not as an obscure optional field buried in a geocoding response that most integrations never notice exists. It is priced the same as everything else, covered under the free daily allowance and billed at the same €0.0001 per request beyond it, or included under the same €50 Unlimited key, exactly like geocoding, IP, and time zone lookups. There is no separate, higher price attached to it that would signal it is considered a specialty feature rather than a standard one.
Part of why elevation gets underrated is that it is genuinely less visible in a typical consumer-facing product than an address or a pin on a map. Nobody notices elevation data directly the way they notice a wrong address on a delivery form. That invisibility to the end user does not make the underlying data less important to the systems that depend on it. A drainage calculation that is off because the elevation figure feeding it was wrong does not announce itself the way a bad address does. It shows up later, as a real-world consequence, in a decision that assumed the ground height was correct.
We treat elevation as one of the parts of our product that is fully working and safe to describe concretely, alongside IP and time zone data, specifically because we think it deserves the same confidence and the same investment as any other core endpoint, not a hedge or a footnote. It is also available as an opt-in addition layered onto a standard response for callers who want ground elevation alongside a location lookup they are already making, rather than requiring a separate specialty product or a separate contract just to access it.
The broader point is that elevation is exactly the kind of data category that suffers when a product treats visibility to the end user as a proxy for actual importance. Some of the most consequential uses of location data in agriculture, engineering, and risk assessment run entirely on data the end user of the resulting product will never directly see. Building that data well, and pricing it like a standard feature rather than a specialty add-on, is a bet that the invisible parts of a system deserve the same care as the visible ones, because the decisions built on top of them are just as real.