We're happy to announce that we started supporting another mapping provider (Mapbox) in addition to Google Maps.
Many of you might recently struggled with creating Google Maps API key and were quite concerned about additional costs from Google. We have added Mapbox as it has very simple account creation procedure, doesn't require your billing info and will help you to avoid additional costs, as Mapbox gives you more generous map usage free quota per month than Google.
Let's compare
First, worth to mention that map services normally track your map activities by these two events: map load and geocoding.
- Map load event happens each time when a visitor lands on your locator page.
- Geocoding - it's an address conversion to lat/lng and it happens each time when a user runs a search against your map.
Ok, now let's look at usage quota offered by Google and Mapbox.
- Google - gives you 200 $ monthly credit, which is equivalent to 28 000 map views or geocoding requests; above quota $7 / 1000 map views , $5 / 1000 geocoding requests
- Mapbox - 50 000 map views , 100 000 geocoding requests ; above quota $5 / 1000 events (map views) and $0.75 / 1000 ( geocoding requests )
What does it mean in real life?
Let's take an imaginary site with store locator installed on one if its pages. Let's say it's a high traffic page and has 50 000 visitors per month and imagine that each user runs 3 searches when he/she's on the page. So, your map monthly usage is 50 000 map views and 50 000 x 3 = 150 000 geocoding requests.
Time to count a bit!
Google : 50 000 map views / 1000 * 7$ + 150 000 geocoding requests / 1000 * 5$ = 1050 $ - 200 $ (free monthly credit) = 850$ / mo
Mapbox : 50 000 map views - 50 000 (free map loads) + 150 000 geocoding requests - 100 000 (free geocoding requests) = 50 000 / 1000 * 0.75$ = 37.5$ / mo
As you can see Mapbox is way cheaper than Google, although per our analysis 95% of our users fit into Google Maps free monthly credit and don't have any additional costs. But if you're running a high traffic site you'll be able to decrease your costs significantly with a simple switch to Mapbox map provider from your Storemapper account settings here.
