And that's just producing the data. Making it available via a low latency and highly available API that handles over 100 billion requests per month requires some work, along with supporting data downloads in various file formats, and integrations into all of the various platforms that our customers want to use our data with.
And that's just on the engineering side of things!
But I'd say that even if our data was publicly availble (and to be fair some geolocation data is available for free - although it's generally not very accurate, and we also have other data sets beyond just geolocation) - there's still lots of value is making that accessible, easy to use and understand, and helping your customers get back to solving thier own problems while you worry about solving that piece for them.
We ran into some minor problems along the way, mostly around cost, and eventually had to switch to something else. We still don't know much about the space and the main thing that stood out about our new provider is that it is cheaper but the data seems to be of lower quality.
Getting finer grained data down to smaller groups blocks is harder and not public.
Packaging it up into easy to consume (normalized) is yet another layer of work.
This comes from a place of amazement not some sort of passive aggressive thing It really astounds me just how bad a I am at judging potential markets. Maybe you could give hope to some of us soul sucked 9-5ers looking to escape. I'm really glad you figured something out.