When unmap is the better fit
- You want to keep what you fetch. Our terms let you cache maps and geocoding results permissively, and what you have cached stays yours to keep and serve after you cancel. Amazon's Service Terms forbid storing or caching location data, with exceptions such as geocodes you request for storage. Every Places call must say
SingleUseor storage up front, and caching counts as storage, billed at $4.00 per 1,000. - Your users search in Canada, in either official language. One record carries its English and French names, plus Indigenous-language names where the source data has them, and a query typed in Inuktitut syllabics finds the place. See Languages.
- You need elevation or IP geolocation from the same key. unmap has an Elevation API and an IP geolocation API. Amazon Location's terrain and contour lines are map styling only, with no elevation lookup, and its feature list has no IP geolocation.
- You search by legal land description. With the Legal Land add-on, a Dominion Land Survey or NTS description such as
NW-25-24-1-W5is an ordinary search query (Legal land). - You want a free tier that does not run out. unmap's dev plan is free for as long as you build. Amazon's free allowances are a trial for the first three months; after that every request is billed.
When Amazon Location is the better fit
- You already run on AWS. Access goes through IAM, Cognito or API keys, resources are provisioned with CloudFormation, and the service reports to CloudWatch and CloudTrail and sends events to EventBridge (benefits). unmap is a separate account and key.
- You track assets or draw geofences. Trackers and Geofences are built in, and their positions stay in your AWS account rather than going to a data provider. unmap has no tracking or geofencing API.
- You search or route outside Canada. unmap's basemap is worldwide, but search and routing cover Canada only, and a route that leaves the country is a
422(Coverage). Amazon's data quality page rates the United States, Canada and Japan comprehensive, and GrabMaps adds more than 500 cities in Southeast Asia. - You route transit or intermodal trips outside Canada.
CalculateRouteshas a Transit travel mode and an Intermodal mode that combines transit with rental, taxi and car. unmap'smode=transitcovers scheduled Canadian transit (Transit routing).
How the bill compares
The table above is Amazon's first paid price for each API, as read on the date shown. The price of a call depends on the options it uses: Places has Label, Core, Advanced and Stored levels, and Routes has Core, Advanced and Premium (pricing levels). Asking for a time zone, for example, moves a geocode to Advanced.
unmap has one meter instead. Every request is one call, tiles included, and every API draws from the same pool. Three bulk paths count work, not requests: batch geocoding is one call per non-blank query, a hosted batch job is one call per eligible row, and Optimize is one call per shipment a successful solve performs. The dev plan is free and for building, not production. Browser calls from localhost are not counted, except Optimize, which counts from every origin. Server-side calls and Optimize draw on 10,000 included calls a month. Indie is US$19 a month for 250,000 calls, then US$1.00 per 1,000. Growth is US$99 a month for 2,000,000 calls, then US$0.75 per 1,000. Plans and limits has the detail.
For maps the units line up, because both sides count tiles, and Amazon's tiles are cheaper. On unmap a map's first paint is about 40 calls, almost all of them tiles. At $0.04 per 1,000, a million Amazon tiles cost $40, while on unmap that million fills half of Growth. For an app that mostly shows maps, Amazon can cost less.
Search and routing are one request on both sides, and Amazon's Core rate of $0.50 per 1,000 is below unmap's overage rate. The difference is in what you may keep: a geocode you store costs $4.00 per 1,000 at Amazon, and on unmap it is an ordinary call. A matrix is where the units part: Amazon counts a route matrix as origins times destinations, so a 10 by 10 request is 100 routes, and a 10 by 10 /matrix request on unmap is one call.
To estimate your own bill, start from about 40 calls for a first paint on an empty browser cache. Panning and zooming add tiles, and return visits fetch fewer. Then add your searches and routes and set the total against a plan's included calls.
