Re:Show HN: Placekey – An ID for Every Place
by arjie on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @02:08PM
(#24700658)
Thanks for reading, mtmail. By design, once you have a key you can just pass it around. It isn't encoded to you or anything. So as you've appended a placekey to more of your datasets you become more independent from Placekey since you really don't need the API anymore.
As for the cost, our objective is to just run this for free for small users and at-cost for anyone who has substantial usage. We're still in the early stages here so we haven't provided explicit numbers or commitments here but I'm curious to hear what you think. What would reassure you as to our intent?
And for what it's worth, one of our aims is stability so if you want to cache responses for long periods of time, that would be A-OK.
From the PDF "In order to maintain the What part of a Placekey, SafeGraph maintains databases of addresses and POI. Incoming addresses and POI are either matched against pre-existing places in our databases, or they are assigned new Placekeys in our database."
"Should a business ping the Placekey API with a massive number of requests—in the millions per month, for example—we may invite you to help us cover those computing costs." I understand the intent, it's providing an API and that has a cost. But isn't the risk the limits are set lower and lower in the future since there is no competition to generating placekeys?