Just for those curious, it's not that cheap actually compared to Google's enterprise level Geocoding. Nor, I'm guessing, is it able to geocode internationally. In which case you might as well use Mapquest, as it's completely free.
Currently, the company I work for uses Google for geocoding and we have 1.1mil a day which ends up costing around $5k (22%) per year more than these folks... but! It includes international geocoding, google maps, etc.
Simply using census data to Geocode US addresses is easy; and there are directions how to do it here in the comments... but setting up Nominatim (from open street maps) is a serious amount of effort (and not cheap for a 32GB server) but /is/ capable of global level geocoding.
One great use case for this service though: using mapbox, which is currently forbidden by Google's TOS...
While I'm stoked to see competition in this space, I wish the competition was a bit more robust (but everyone has gotta start some where, right?)
I hope you all continue forward with this, and hopefully add international capabilities as well as price drops. I for one would do away with your free offer altogether as the free users ROI will probably always be an expensive crap-fest and allocate those resources to driving the price down for your paying customers.
If/when you all can do ~1.1mil international geocodes per day for less than $10k a year, LET ME KNOW! :)
Other founder of Geocodio here -- thanks for your feedback! You bring up a lot of good points.
Building off of what's above, Geocodio is intended to be accessible to developers who don't have $10k to drop on geocodes. We found that this is a big need in the community (and for ourselves for our other projects). All of the other non-major-mapping geocoding services we found, including CSV upload instead of API, were more expensive than $0.001/each (oftentimes much more -- $0.25+)
Also, we don't have limitations to how you use the data. No requirements that you use a specific brand of map with it, no attribution requirements, etc.
We priced it at this point, with a free tier, so that people can give it a try first. No, our data isn't quite as good as Google's -- we get about 90% of addresses within 1 mile, and most within a tenth of a mile -- and we want people to be able to play around with the service and get to know it before they have to give credit card info.
With that said, we definitely plan to continue improving the product and add international support.
PS. We are HUGE fans of Mapbox, so we're pretty excited that you listed that as a potential use case :)
Thanks for the feedback, it's really valuable! The idea behind Geocodio is definitely to prevent you from needing to go through the hassle of building a dataset yourself and hosting it, it is indeed a very time consuming process. Note that mapquest still has a 5k/requests per day limit [1] making this a viable alternative.
As mentioned in our FAQ [2] we do indeed provide special pricing and capacity for high-volume users, we would definitely be able to match Google's pricing by far.
Currently, the company I work for uses Google for geocoding and we have 1.1mil a day which ends up costing around $5k (22%) per year more than these folks... but! It includes international geocoding, google maps, etc.
Simply using census data to Geocode US addresses is easy; and there are directions how to do it here in the comments... but setting up Nominatim (from open street maps) is a serious amount of effort (and not cheap for a 32GB server) but /is/ capable of global level geocoding.
One great use case for this service though: using mapbox, which is currently forbidden by Google's TOS...
While I'm stoked to see competition in this space, I wish the competition was a bit more robust (but everyone has gotta start some where, right?)
I hope you all continue forward with this, and hopefully add international capabilities as well as price drops. I for one would do away with your free offer altogether as the free users ROI will probably always be an expensive crap-fest and allocate those resources to driving the price down for your paying customers.
If/when you all can do ~1.1mil international geocodes per day for less than $10k a year, LET ME KNOW! :)