We're proud to announce significant improvements to our pricing model. No worries - we're not increasing the prices nor forcing you to switch to the new pricing. In fact, new pricing significantly increases the value you as a customer can get for your money - up to 10x more than before. It also much more flexible and future-proof, and eliminates the need for a complex pricing structure based on feature-focused pricing plans.
If you're a paying customer already, you can keep using your existing plan. And if you're on a Free tier - now you can send up to 30% more requests than before. And of course, both new and existing customers can switch to new plans at any time.
Below I'll elaborate on the ideas and motivation behind our new pricing model in more detail. If you're short on time, please feel free to skip the details and scroll down directly to the summary.
You can also just check our new pricing page - it has all the details needed to understand how new pricing works.
New pricing model
Our new pricing model uses a universal cost measure for all API request types - "usage credit". Credit is a representation of API request cost, and the number of credits per API request is proportional to how "heavy" the request is.
For example, a single map tile request costs just a small fraction of credit, while 5x5 route matrix API request costs 25 credits. For simplicity you can assume that one API requests cost one credit - this is true for the vast majority of our APIs.
I recommend taking a quick look at our pricing details page to learn more about how API request type and its parameters influence the cost.
With API request cost expressed in credits, limits and quotas are not bound to the number of specific API requests anymore. Instead, a quota is based on the total amount of credits consumed by all API calls within the given period.
For more high-level picture, you can check our pricing page for a detailed overview of plans, prices, and quotas. It has a built-in pricing calculator that will help you to model your usage scenario and choose an optimal plan.
Another notable change is that plan limits are now counted and checked per day, not per month. This change encourages fair resource utilization across all customers of our platform and allows us to offer up to 10x more API requests per month than before for the same money. If you plan to send many non-interactive, batch API requests please consider using our [Asynchronous Batch API](https://apidocs.geoapify.com/docs/batch/. With it, you can send up to 2x more requests for the same credit quota.
The motivation for the change
When Geoapify started its journey as a mapping platform, we were offering just basic raster maps, routing, and isochrone APIs with regional coverage. Our original pricing model included several plans tiered by the number of monthly API requests, counted by request type. This was good and straightforward for thee APIs and worked pretty well for most of our customers.
Since then, we were growing very fast as an API provider and as a business, serving hundreds of new customers and learning from them. And now, in January 2021 we offer almost twenty different APIs and an even bigger number of features. Such quick evolution has changed almost everything - except our pricing model.
What was simple and straightforward for three APIs became confusing and at times sub-optimal as the number of APIs and features was growing. We were addressing known shortcomings by introducing custom and feature-focused (e.g. Geocoding-only) plans. Yet this approach was requiring more and more plans - and was making our pricing confusing. Also, switching between and combining plans was becoming tricky.
So we realized it is time to rethink and update our pricing model - based on your feedback, our learnings, and growth plans.
Pricing change summary
In short, we keep all same great features we were offering before - a rich set of APIs, predictable and safe pricing, up to 30x lower costs comparing to competitors, flexibility, and permissive usage terms. New pricing essentially gives you, as a customer, even more value and more flexibility, and us, as a provider, a clean and straightforward way to extend our offering in the future.
What has changed
- introduced "credit" as a universal cost measure for all API types
- brand new pricing plans, optimized accordingly to your feedback
- daily credit limits instead of monthly limits per API request type
What stays the same
- generous free tier
- most permissive usage policy on the market
- flat, predictable pricing without overage costs
- full access to all our APIs on any of our plans
- all existing customer can keep their current pricing and conditions
Next steps
The new pricing is available starting Monday 11 January 2021.
To simplify the transition, we updated the usage statistics page in MyProjects to show both API request count and usage cost in credits. We also calculated credit usage retrospectively, so you can check your historical data and see how new pricing works for your case.
If you have any questions or suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact us. We will be happy to help.
