FSAirlines

Hi Flyers.

As those who have been around for a while know we have had some issues with the cost of google maps, well Google has changed there polices again.

Until recently the way it worked is they gave us a block free credit on usage but each map view costs money, I figured to keep us under the limit I restricted the map views just to those with premium accounts and also set a daily limit of 1000 views.

Turns on starting 1 March 2025 they changed the plan to instead of a blanket credit for all services, each different service has a free usage limit of which the 'Maps JavaScript API' has a limit of 10000 calls per month, which we used up on 11 March.

I learned about this today because I got an email from 'Google Payments' saying they just hit my credit card with a big payment for 'Google Cloud Services' which I had never seen before, at least not seen in many years, at first I though it must be an online phishing scam, but no, it was real.

So for now I have dropped our daily quota down from 1000 calls per day to 300 and will probably modify the code so that trial members don't see them, although only about 37% of our premium members are trial accounts, so maybe not.

If anyone knows of a service like the google maps we use that could be an alternative please let me know.

Honestly, I'd drop the maps. While it is handy to see a map of where one flew from, most people I know that fly have a map already via either Volantra, FSHUB, STKP, or other methods. We can see in the flight stats page who and where people are flying to and from- don't need a map for that. Might be handy for individuals to see the places they flew to on the map when viewing their logbook, but again if using one of the afore mentioned apps one can review their flights on that. Saves on you getting hit with a hefty payment if Google decides to change their policies and pricing again and again. Or you may need to look at working in the fee for the map API into our subscription fees so you alone are not getting the hit. But I don't really see the need for the map if I have a map in another app I use constantly and can review previous flights.

Just my 5 cents

I have no idea how map interfaces work but here is an open source one many websites use:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/about

Kinda agree with the above post. It's nice eye candy but not if the cost makes said eye candy prohibitive.