Pay-as-you-go for each API and SDK
Every Mapbox API and SDK is now available to developers on pay-as-you-go, giving a fair price no matter what you build — no commitments needed. We’ve increased our free tier for almost every product and publicly published pricing for all services, including new volume discounts that automatically trigger as usage increases.
This is more than changing pricing — it’s about making our platform easier to consume. If you are using Mapbox, you know we are customer obsessed. We care about building trust and loyalty by solving your problems, scaling with your growth, and delivering. We believe everyone should have predictable pricing, only pay for what they use with no commitments, contracts, capacity planning, or price modeling — just build and ship.
By increasing our free tier, sharing predictable pricing for our APIs and SDKs, and applying volume discounts on pay-as-you-go, we’re showing how our core values align with your business.
What’s changing:
Increased free tier: We’ve upped our free tier for almost every product — letting developers build more with our tools before needing to pay anything.
Pay-as-you-go: Our pay-as-you-go pricing gives developers a fair price no matter what they build. Only pay for what is used — no commitments necessary.
No commercial restrictions: We are phasing out differentiated pricing. Our tools are designed to work across every use case and industry. Whether you’re building for the public or your internal use, we can support both.
Volume discounts for all: Discounts increase as usage grows, when an application reaches volume scale, it automatically gets volume pricing. With progressive discounts, we’re smoothing out the pricing curve so a developer using 999,999 API calls doesn’t pay more than someone using 1,000,000 API calls. No negotiation necessary.
Committed-use discounts: If developers want to commit to an annual volume to receive increased discounts beyond standard published volume discounts they can contact our sales team.
Use-case based pricing: We always offer individual API pricing for developers, and we’re also starting to group API requests for common use cases. Rather than trying to calculate all the individual API calls that go into a solution, we packaged up pricing so that it works with your existing metrics. For example, we offer “monthly active users” for mobile apps, and will soon offer pricing per “trip” for ride-hailing, and “completed searches” rather than individual keystrokes.
Understandable billing: We’re changing our billing units to match how people already think about their product. For example, web maps usage will now be measured primarily by map load. This change aligns our invoices with metrics companies already track and makes it easier to compare usage with other mapping providers. You’ll be charged whenever your website or web application loads, not by when users pan and zoom around the map.
Support at every level: Support plans are no longer only for Enterprise customers. We’re introducing three new support options, including a guaranteed email response time for Pay-as-you-go users. Enterprise users will now be able to choose from our Business or Premium support options, which offer private GitHub repos, guided evaluation, dedicated support engineers, and more.
How we price impacts how our tools are used
Over the course of building Mapbox, we have aimed to make every major decision to maximize the value of our platform to our customers. How we price our tools has a significant impact on how those tools get used and what gets built with Mapbox. We were pricing some of our APIs wrong — making things confusing and restrictive. Rolling out new pricing took close to five months; informed by the stories of our builders whose curiosity and insight gave us a lot of honest feedback. Here’s what we were doing wrong:
- Unpredictable pricing at scale
- Development slowed by price modeling and negotiating volumes
- Unintuitive billing units
- Hard to compare measurement to our friends at Google
- Confusion around when commercial plans are needed
Our goal with this change is to reduce the friction to build with our tools and to allow our team to help developers use maps and locations more creatively. As we designed this new pricing, we kept our key pricing principles in mind:
- Predictable and aligned with metrics our customers already measure
- Clearly defined discount tiers as businesses scale with no surprises
- Product usage measured in a way that’s clear to all involved
- Generous free tier to encourage building and make it easier to get started
With these changes, the majority of our pay-as-you-go customers will see their bill go down while some of our pay-as-you-go customers will see increases to their bill. No one is going to get a surprise. These changes won’t go into effect until November 20, 2019, so customers who will see an increase in their bill have time to review their invoices and talk to our sales team. If you’re eligible for savings, you can opt-in to the new pricing today from your account dashboard.
Pricing is available to all new developers, starting today
Take a look at our pricing page for more for even more details. Play with our price calculator to estimate your bill, and if you have more questions you can contact our team at developers@mapbox.com.
New pricing was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.