No. This is a demo of an open-source project that I've released for free.
> To me it seems like something that has been around for a very long time and is now being resold under a new label of "geocoding"
That's just what this class of software is called.
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/o...
https://docs.mapbox.com/api/search/geocoding/
https://github.com/komoot/photon
https://www.here.com/platform/geocoding
https://developer.tomtom.com/geocoding-api/documentation/geo...
https://geocoding.geo.census.gov/geocoder/
https://github.com/Qwant/mimirsbrunn
All of these call themselves geocoders.
> 25 years ago tiny contained $100 GPS units had the entire US on a 2 GB flash card.
Yeah! Super cool feat of engineering accomplished mostly by requiring you to do structured search, if I remember correctly. I never drove with one as they were a bit before my time. I remember them being very fiddly, but that was an observation I made from the back seat of a car as a child so, grain of salt. And yes to google maps offering this for free as a part of their maps client. Not free if you're a 3rd party software developer though, as you'll see if you click through the first link I posted above.
I don't know why people are paying $100 a month unless they just don't know about other options. To me it seems like something that has been around for a very long time and is now being resold under a new label of "geocoding", like $400 headphones or the famous "toasted" lucky strikes line.
I guess people pay for filtered DNS servers and that is even more trivial, so maybe I'm out of touch, but those don't cost much either.