from Hacker News

Radar Maps Platform

by aleyan on 9/26/23, 11:38 PM with 80 comments

  • by erhaetherth on 9/27/23, 3:16 AM

    You had me until this pricing page: https://radar.com/pricing?type=consumer

    I'm interested in the address autocompletion in particular, but you guys don't want to tell me how much it's actually going to cost apparently.

    I also have no idea what a "monthly tracked user" is or how it's relevant.

    LMK when you drop the "Contact Sales" aspect.

  • by edrxty on 9/27/23, 8:45 AM

    Was hoping for some sort of interesting synthetic aperture radar (SAR) mapping service like Capella Space. Instead got more adtech APIs :/

    Why did they name themselves "Radar"?

  • by johncalvinyoung on 9/27/23, 3:38 AM

    What's the terms on your forward geocoding? Many providers have terms that require live lookup of address->latlong, no caching permitted. My client's use case has long-lived addresses that may need to be mapped many times, and currently we're paying for one of the only geocoding services that permits us to persist the coordinates involved.

  • by leonardo2204 on 9/27/23, 3:06 AM

    Not sure if I missed it, but how do you calculate address completion request? I mean, Google let me pass a random key for every Word I type and charge me once. Do you have something similar? Or each letter counts as 1 request?

    Thanks for this great Project!

  • by nickpatrick on 9/27/23, 1:57 AM

    Radar CEO here. Welcome any questions or feedback!

  • by KronisLV on 9/27/23, 6:51 AM

    I was actually looking into options for maps, geocoding and routing for a freelance thing that I'm doing and this actually seems great! I might go with Mapbox for the already started project, but will probably use Radar for at least something in the future.

    The other options I considered were Mapbox and MapTiler, since it seems that actually self-hosting everything yourself is a bit demanding on hardware resources. I mean, I love that you can get the OSM dataset into PostGIS pretty easily, but getting the vector data or raster tiles to the client can take a bit of CPU power and bunches of storage! I wonder whether I missed any other good cloud services, or a self-hosted stack that would make things easier.

    That said, I wonder why so many seem to be moving away from raster tiles to vector data. I guess you can cache both and vector data is actually less storage intensive, but at the same time pretty much every vector map implementation lags badly on my phone and sometimes even a bit on my netbook (Radar still lags for me, although less than Mapbox, probably because Mapbox does the whole fancy 3D globe thing with fog and stuff).

    Either way, major props for making this exist and pricing it so competitively! Would be cool to also fix the attribution text that's on the lower right on desktop but doesn't show up on mobile, at least for me.

  • by Animats on 9/27/23, 2:08 AM

    But not actual RADAR maps, with weather and aircraft returns.

  • by Ayesh on 9/27/23, 2:45 AM

    Geocoding is certainly _much_ cheaper than other providers.

  • by yeskia on 9/27/23, 2:01 AM

    This looks cool, but the pricing isn't exactly clear. Website says $0.50/1K API calls and then the HN title says $0.50/1K map loads. Is a map load === 1 API call?

  • by kwerk on 9/27/23, 1:57 AM

    Wow. I just hacked together a geo coding api myself for a project using postgis. Wish I’d seen this.

  • by Vanit on 9/27/23, 2:47 AM

    What's the policy for attribution and saving copies of annotated maps for distribution?

  • by ale42 on 9/27/23, 8:18 AM

    Am I the only one who thought it was some aggregator for weather radar data?

  • by thatsnotmepls on 9/27/23, 2:24 AM

    What does it mean for a map to be vector based?

  • by Something1234 on 9/27/23, 2:08 AM

    Do you have a static maps api I can push some geojson to draw over?

  • by webappguy on 9/27/23, 5:52 AM

    Check out HERE for great pricing