Mapzen Shutdown

[NelsonMinar]

Oh I'm so sad for them. Mapzen has a bunch of really great products and services, they are some of the top experts in open source mapping. It's a shame the business hasn't worked out.

They have a good companion post on alternative services for folks needing to migrate. It doubles as a survey of the best in open source mapping tools out there right now. https://mapzen.com/blog/migration/

Edit also a post specific to the Who's On First project: https://www.whosonfirst.org/blog/2018/01/02/chapter-two/

[bsder]

> They have a good companion post on alternative services for folks needing to migrate. It doubles as a survey of the best in open source mapping tools out there right now. https://mapzen.com/blog/migration/

That post needs to be archived somewhere before the shutdown.

[brightball]

Great to know. I’d been thinking about setting up these tools just to tinker anyway.

[CPLX]

I am excited to see a shutdown notice that is clear, short, not full of vague platitudes, and free of the word "journey"

[hkmurakami]

That's because they weren't acquired so they don't have to write editorial spin.

[a13n]

What's a better word to describe working on a startup, from start to finish, than journey?

[kevincennis]

Really sad to see. I've been very happy with Mapzen for the past year or so.

Their open source stuff is really good, and the service itself is excellent as well. Not quite as polished as Google/Mapbox, but absolutely usable in production apps.

Would be very interested to read a post mortem. Did they simply struggle to find users, was their pricing strategy wrong, was quality an issue?

If anyone at Mapzen is reading these comments, thank you for all the work you've done. I'll miss you guys.

[rmc]

> Would be very interested to read a post mortem. Did they simply struggle to find users, was their pricing strategy wrong, was quality an issue?

Didn't they only start charging for anything 9 months ago? Before then everything was free? ( https://mapzen.com/blog/mapzen-flex/ )

[snarf21]

I know a bunch of the team there but don't know all the inside scoop.

They were trying freemium with the hosted services but not many people were paying. One of the issues (imo) is that there really isn't open traffic data (but there should be). This really hampers some of the more interesting routing things and they were focused on a lot of the more multi-modal and pulling in elevation data for biking, etc. Some people were doing some pretty cool stuff with their tools but I think in the end Google gives away enough API transactions for most people and the quality is good enough.

[jlengrand]

There is a product from Mapzen that I have never seen anywhere else : Isochrones (https://mapzen.com/documentation/mobility/isochrone/api-refe...). Been interested in this for years (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9403699/map-of-all-point...) They were the only ones to provide a solution.

I am super sad to see this go and still haven't seen any alternative.

Happy to hear about anything in this direction :s.

[rburhum]

Ahem:

- GRASS has had that since the 80s: https://grass.osgeo.org/grass72/manuals/addons/r.traveltime....

- ESRI has had those in web form since the 90s: https://doc.arcgis.com/en/arcgis-online/analyze/create-drive...

- GeoTrellis has that working in an open source project on top of a Spark cluster: https://transit.geotrellis.io/travelshed.html

[detaro]

https://graphhopper.com/api/1/docs/isochrone/

https://developer.here.com/documentation/routing/topics/requ...

[aglionby]

Mapnificent [0] seems to do something similar and I had some fun playing around with it for my city. It doesn't seem to go into as much detail as Mapzen and doesn't have an API, but it's open source.

[0] https://www.mapnificent.net

[DanFau]

Oalley [0] is a simple tool to draw isochrones and the REST API is available here: https://api.oalley.fr/

[0] http://oalley.net/ disclaimer: I developed Oalley

[mcooley]

Bing has one: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt814921.aspx

[merusame]

openrouteservice.org has them also, rest API also available

[pheelicks]

It is a great shame to see them go, was always impressed with the quality of their products and ecosystem built around it.

If there are any Mapzeners here looking for something new, please consider taking a look at www.procedural.eu - we also make a WebGL mapping engine based on OSM data, but our focus is more using procedural generation to augment the data, to generate immersive 3D natural environments for visualizing ski resorts, hiking routes etc.

[samstave]

I want to know more

[danso]

That’s sad news. I was planning to use them for my programming class. The Geocoding and other APIs, besides being free and generous, were easy to learn and very useful. The technical blog posts were also enlightening.

[riordan]

Have you considered teaching your journalism students Docker first?

[yosamino]

> we’re optimistic about what’s next.

Well... what's next for me is rewriting this application in the next 30 days.

Not feeling too "optimistic" there about that.

[freyfogle]

Do you need geocoding? I ask because I am one of the makers of the OpenCage geocoder. We offer forward and reverse geocoding from open data (primarily OpenStreetMap, but also others). We're listed in the migration guide, and we'll be offering 20% off our pricing for all former Mapzen customers. Blog post about that is coming shortly.

I hope we can help you.

https://geocoder.opencagedata.com

Edit: here's the post about the 20% lifetime discount for former Mapzen customers: https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/mapzen

[aw3c2]

Which API(s) do you rely on? Are you sure that self-hosting them is not an option?

[gopi_ar]

We're putting up a mapzen / pelias compatible endpoint soon on our geocoding service.

https://locationiq.org

It's OSM compatible at the moment.

[johansch]

They are optimistic about getting paid next month.

[gerry_shaw]

Anybody know if there is a hosted libpostal service? I didn't notice in the migration document. It's easy to include in our application if we need to but it's used infrequently and consumes a couple of gigabytes of memory so we've found it useful to call as a service when needed.

[jimmyrocks]

Such sad news. Mapzen has been a core component of many projects that I've worked with. They have created and supported many great products that will be missed.

They also have been a big part of supporting the GeoNYC group and helping to organize the OpenStreetMap US conferences.

Thanks for all the maps and data Mapzen!

[thinkloop]

Am I the only one who constantly discovers cool services during their shutdown notices? It feels like half of them can start to make it after the press they get during shutdown.

[LeonM]

Why are they shutting down?

[daenney]

I'm going to guess: not enough customers to get them to a point where the business is sustainable and not being able to find inverstors that are willing to invest in something like this.

They have a very nice product but competing with the likes of Google is hard.

[velmu]

On the Github page of Valhalla* it states the team is joining MapBox. Whether this is a cause of effect will be interesting to hear.

ANOUNCEMENT: The Valhalla team is joining Mapbox where we'll be taking Valhalla to the next level! Stay Tuned!! An Open Source Routing Library/Service

* https://github.com/valhalla

[karussell]

Anyone from Mapzen here on why this has such a short timeframe for paying customers? Not even 1 month! Are there possibilities to extend this somehow?

[jermaustin1]

How long until someone makes a script to install and configure all of the opensource products and clones the API to run on a DO droplet?

[kevincennis]

I remember reading it takes several days on super beefy hardware just to import all of the data from openstreetmap and openaddresses they they use to run mapzen.

I don't think this is a thing where you just whip up a docker-compose file and spin up a Heroku dyno.

[drumttocs8]

Sad to see this. I've been using Mapbox for my projects, if only because their documentation was pretty good for a beginner like me- but Mapzen seemed like an excellent service, and I hate to see that competition die.

[kbjudit]

If you need an alternative, please also keep an eye on MAPCAT. Our OSM-based public map portal is already live (www.mapcat.com), and the map API is just about to be launched. More info at http://try.mapcat.com/

[GlennS]

I've made quite a bit of use of Tangram JS (which I was very impressed by), and also of Mapzen's Open Street Map metro extracts and the IMPOSM project. Both very useful - thanks Mapzen.

Hope everyone involved manages to find new work swiftly.

[ben_aus]

Are you using Mapzen's vector tiles with Tangram? If so have you decided on a replacement? Mapzen pricing was good, too good it seems. I require access to global tiles but very low amount of requests with a custom Tangram JS yaml.

[peterbecich]

The Metro Extracts tool was super useful to a project my team and I worked on. Thank you Mapzen!

[eruci]

Sorry to hear that. Is openaddresses.io, one of their backed projects dying too? I've been using their data on geocode.xyz, but it seems like there has not been any new data in the past 6 months.

[jennoo]

Does anyone recommend a good alternative which embraces the open source mentality so I am allowed to permanently store the data.

[kbjudit]

If you need an alternative, please consider MAPCAT. Our OSM-based public map portal is already live, and the map API is just about to be launched. For more info please check http://www.mapcat.com and http://try.mapcat.com

[karussell]

They have listed only alternatives that have a similar philosophy: https://mapzen.com/blog/migration/

[gd2]

In with the people who are calling this a sad shutdown.

[fiatjaf]

How can we use https://github.com/davidar/ipfs-maps ?

[aw3c2]

It depends what you need. If you need an outdated, highly filtered dataset, sure. But no need for IPFS, just grab the tiles from https://openmaptiles.com/ where you also find the appropriate license (which this demo does not seem to include...)