Support › Meta Box Geolocation › New Google maps pricing policy and MB geolocationResolved
- This topic has 25 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated 6 years, 3 months ago by
Anh Tran.
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May 3, 2018 at 7:35 PM #9438
poehnix
ParticipantHi,
according to my understanding, starting June 11th 2018, google maps api users will be forced to give a credit card number to use the service, even if they do not reach the 25.000 hits per day ( free daily rate usage).
It is not feasable to ask for a client credit card or force him to generate a private api key, so I would like to ask if it's going to be provided a different (free) geolocation service for Metabox geolocation plugin, maybe with the possibility to choose between google maps and the new geolocation provider
All the info about the subject can be found here https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/user-guide/Thank you
MicheleMay 3, 2018 at 10:40 PM #9439david.h
ParticipantI had wondered about this too.
Anh, what about supporting OpenStreetMap?
May 4, 2018 at 1:21 PM #9450Anh Tran
KeymasterI got an email from Google 2 days ago regarding the same problem. It says that Google still provide free tier for user. The free usage is equivalent to $200 per month. Adding credit card to your billing info will be able to add a coupon to your account that increases the limit to $500 per month.
I attached the screenshots here so you can see the details:
https://imgur.com/gallery/h200Jhk
One big note in this announcement is that all fields that don’t have API key won’t work any longer.
So, I think in short terms, the Google Maps field still works if you already have a API key. However, in long term, we should figure out a better way. I’ll check Open Street Maps to see if we can integrate it.
May 4, 2018 at 3:14 PM #9452ParticipantDear Anh thank you for your answer.
I got the eamil too. Google documentation unfortunately is not clear on pricying. They contradict themselves. You can can check the whole thing here https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/user-guide/pricing-changes/ but I will highlight the key passages in uppercaseQuestion: Can I still use Google Maps Platform for free?
Answer: Yes. Starting June 11, 2018, WHEN YOU ENABLE BILLING, you get $200 free usage every month for Maps, Routes, or Places. Based on the millions of users using our APIs today, most of them can continue to use Google Maps Platform for free with this credit.Question: Can I try Google Maps Platform before deciding to purchase?
Answer: Yes. We want you to experience the speed, accuracy, and comprehensive coverage of Maps, Routes, and Places. YOU NEED A BILLING ACCOUNT TO START, but your first $200 of monthly usage is free, and you can set usage caps to ensure you don’t go over this amount.THE LAST QUESTION /ANSWER IS THE MOST IMPORTANT/CONTROVERT, SO I WONT UPPERCASE THE WHOLE OF IT.
Question: Is a credit card or billing account required?
Answer:Even though your first $200 of monthly usage is free, all Google Cloud Platform services require a credit card and billing account, to cover any amount you spend over this free credit. If you are billed, we'll credit your account for the first $200 of monthly usage. If you choose not to add a billing account, there is a risk that if your usage exceeds $200 in a given month, your Maps API implementation will be degraded or other API requests will return an error. If your estimated usage will be above $200 a month and you don't have a credit or debit card to set up a billing account, a local Google Maps Partner may be able to help.The first sentence says a credit card is compulsory. The second sentence says you have a choice.
According to my understanding Google says it's up to his grace to let your keys function and who, when and for how long continue to support any single key.
The main reason for this is that stopping all the free services for all at the single time will mahe google loose potential customer. Probably they will "kill" keys that generate a fair amount of traffic saying "Hey, I told you I would have done this", leaving all the low traffic keys, maybe adding a bandwidth limit to slow them down.Can we afford this uncertanty ? These days some services I use that are based on google maps started working awkward. It might be a coincidence, but I read this of a wanted threat of the times to come.
The key point here is that, given the type of clients I have, I cannot ask for their credit card details. 11th of June is round the cornder so, at least to me, adding openstreetmap (or other) support with geocoding should be a priority
Sorry for the long post. Thank you for the time spent to read it. I think a lot of developers are in my position right now.
As always, thank you for your work and the excellent support you provide for your extensions.Sincerely
MicheleMay 4, 2018 at 8:14 PM #9456ParticipantHi Anh and Michele,
I think the main issue here is that Google could change their Terms of Service again and reduce the "free" offering, whereas OpenStreetMap is open source meaning that if Metabox incorporates OSM there should never be an issue.
In addition, OpenStreetMap uses data collated from a wide variety of official sources (including Geonames) so it's very reliable and the open source nature of the project means it fits well with the WordPress way of thinking.
There are many mature GPL plugins on the WordPress repository that facilitate OSM. Presumably one of these would give a good starting point for integration: https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/tags/openstreetmap/
OpenStreetMap gets my vote.
May 5, 2018 at 11:09 PM #9461ParticipantAnh,
Check out these OSM "fields" for Gravity Forms and ACF - they should be relatively straightforward to convert into the Metabox equivalent:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/brilliant-geocoder-gravity-forms/
https://github.com/mcguffin/acf-field-openstreetmapThanks,
DavidMay 5, 2018 at 11:43 PM #9462KeymasterHi Michele and David,
Thanks a lot for your inputs. The inconsistent and unclear of information from Google is a big concern to us.
I'll check the OSM next week and will try to provide a quick workaround.
July 4, 2018 at 6:02 PM #10437KeymasterHey guys,
I'm almost done the OSM field for Meta Box. It's available on Github, in the map-field branch. You can try it now. Here is how it looks so far:
https://i.imgur.com/bqpCvwN.png
However, I see OSM doesn't provide Geocoding service, which doesn't allow us to look up for an address and find its location on the map. There are several services out there (Bing, Mapbox, ArcGIS), but they are not OSM-official and of course have some limitation on usage.
I'd probably will put the OSM field into a separate extension because of this limitation. While Google wants to take money from us, its product is really good and widely used.
What do you guys think about that?
July 4, 2018 at 8:49 PM #10439ParticipantHi Anh,
That's looking great.
There are some ways to geocode without Google, the following is a reliable open source service with an accomplished API:
https://github.com/komoot/photon
http://photon.komoot.de/A different (and maybe better) approach is a Metabox extension using Leaflet which handles nearly all of Google's paid services but using open source data/APIs:
https://github.com/Leaflet/Leaflet
Hope this helps.
July 4, 2018 at 8:57 PM #10440ParticipantIf you haven't time to look at Leaflet too much (it's massive), here are some Leaflet geocoding plugins:
July 5, 2018 at 8:49 AM #10446KeymasterJuly 6, 2018 at 1:57 AM #10463ParticipantHi Anh,
This looks perfect.
I'm currently juggling several projects and my staging environment is down at the moment, but I'll try and test it next week.
Thanks
July 12, 2018 at 11:05 PM #10555ParticipantHi Ahn and David, sorry for the delayed answer.
I will be able to test the code only next week. Anyway, the provided link on github (https://github.com/wpmetabox/meta-box/tree/map-field) returns a 404, so i do not know how to get the code. Ahn, could you please give us the right url ?
I am eager to try the new map&geocoding plugin. Just out of curiosity, is there any reason why you haven't used the Nominatim tools for geocoding that comes with openstreetmap? Reference can be found here
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/NominatimThank you for your effort. Next week, once I have the code I will be able to test it.
For the moment thank you for your hard workBye
MicheleJuly 15, 2018 at 6:26 AM #10573KeymasterHi Michele,
I've merged the branch into the
masterbranch, so it's available at https://github.com/wpmetabox/meta-box/. At the moment, I only finished theosmfield, which is an alternative formapfield. If everything goes right, Geolocation will be the next step.And yes, I use Nominatim for the geocoding :). I found the wiki, but didn't look at that carefully until I read code of other libraries. It's great and not hard to implement.
July 17, 2018 at 11:26 PM #10604ParticipantHi Ahn,
I have made a bit of testing. I made a new post type with title, editor and osm metabox in code ( osm map + address text field) using metabox from github master branchOn the backend everything seems to be ok. Geolocation works almost fine. The only problem I see is that if the address is not known by openstreetmap, which happens in OSM more than google maps, there is no feedback message (something like "address not found") but, given that markers can be moved "by hand" one can look for another place and then move the marker manually, so it's not a big deal.
On the frontend unfortunately I am not able to display the map. rwmb_meta( 'mapID', $args ) returns an array with the coordinates and zoom value and not the map as expected, something like array(3) { ["latitude"]=> string(10)
"39.7995053" ["longitude"]=> string(10) "18.3579493" ["zoom"]=> string(2) "16" }
I might be missing something trivial here, can you please give me an advice on what I am doing wrong ?One last thing: I had upgraded the geolocation plugin to latest release but I had to revert it back because of some notices on line 73 of geolocation class (types not defined). Probably something related to the geo paramenter. Since geolocation is working, at this point it is not clear if the "geo" parameter (or even the geolocation plugin itself) is needed and / or what one has to put in there.
I will made more tests when I have these info. In the meantime thank you for your hard work.
Bye
Michele -
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