This post is also available in: Norsk bokmål (Norwegian Bokmål)

Mapzen, the routing provider we have been using for the last year, sadly announced a couple days ago that they are shutting down at the end of January.

This is both sudden and sad news. Mapzen have delivered a great service, at a very cheap price. All our use in 2017 haven’t cost us more than about 50 NOK (about 6 USD).

New tool already operational

We have worked quickly, and done a thorough check of our alternatives. There is only one that give us everything we need, without charging us a ton of money.

And it is with pleasure I can say that we’ve already switched to GraphHopper. GraphHopper give us the same data we got from Mapzen, in addition to some new data we’ve never had available before.

Sadly this also means that we have a cost increase of about 2-3 000 NOK per year (~250-400 USD). But this is about 20 times lower than the other alternatives.

New functionality

One of the most annoying thins with the old route calculation, is the message saying that something went wrong with one of the waypoints. Figuring out which cache to exclude was time consuming, and not very fun.

That’s why I’m very happy to say that that’s no longer an issue!

You will instead get a error message explaining which cache/waypoint that’s causing the trouble.

GraphHopper also give us information about elevation along the route. We don’t use that information anywhere yet, but we intend to do so.

We’re still working on it

Even though we already, if we ignore the increased cost, have a better service than we had before, you should expect to see minor issues in the coming days.

We are still working on improved error messages (we concentrated on the most important first, the one telling which cache to exclude) and improved usage and display of the data we get.

If you see any strange error messages, or experience any issues, please let us know!

We also have to spend some time monitoring the usage. We have a limited daily quota, and we might have to take some actions to reduce the load. If we have to increase the quota, the cost will also increase. We don’t know yet what we eventually end up doing. We might have to pay more. We might have to turn of the automatic calculation, and just use on-demand (meaning that you have to click “Order ny route calculation” in the menu). We might have to implement quotas per user. And maybe we don’t have to do anything. That’s what we have to figure out in the coming weeks.

Anyway, we are very pleased to announce that we have been able to save one of our most important features!

This post is also available in: Norsk bokmål (Norwegian Bokmål)


thomfre

thomfre er hovedutvikler og personen bak cachetur.no.