dcwalker30

I know it's been over a year since you posted this, but when I searched for "Arkansas geocachers" this came up in the Google search results. If you haven't found it already, check out arkgeocaching.org and be on the lookout for C.A.G.E. events (Central Arkansas Geocacher Event). Happy hunting and see you around.

Thank you so much for bringing Google Maps back!

+1billion

**Deleted because I was just being mean**

You will notice the default map is not pointing to OSM's tile server. They are pointing to MapQuests OSM servers. You have to physically switch to OSM's tile servers to create any load on them. What exactly is the issue there? We've explained why the maps had to do the change, people have guesstimated on the attributed costs that we would incure if we stuck with Google maps. -Raine Raine, It's not really guesstimation when we know A.) How much Google charges per 1000 hits over 25,000/day. and B.) How many hits/day Geocaching.com produces. Unless Groundspeak's figures were not accurate, we have a very good idea of how much it would cost Groundspeak per day/year. The only real guesstimation is to the number of Premium Members. The real point here is that Google Maps was apparently highly valued by your members. I sincerely hope that Grounspeak is in meetings all day working to solve the issue. There are many other solutions to this issue. I think we all completely understand that Grounspeak can't simply 'foot the bill' and no one is asking them to.

I have only ever paid for my PM for two main reasons. The first is to allow me to seach for PM caches. The second is to receive PQ’s. If you want different mapping there are lots of other options. You can even just pull the GPX file into Google Earth if you like. If you want satellite photos before searching for a cache copy and paste the coordinates into Google Maps. I for one would NOT be paying for any increase to gain the Google Maps functionality. The $30 membership includes a value placed on the overall product (both real and intangible aspects) by the consumer. Most of the reason I am a PM is just to say "thanks" to Groundspeak for keeping this going. I couldn't care less about PQs, Recently Viewed, the Stats Page, etc. Even though the Google Maps API wasn't part of what we were paying for, it had a value assigned to it by (what appears to be) a great number of PMs. If you take away that service, you lower that perceived value. If you lower the value without decreasing the cost, you're going to potentially lose paying customers. I think this entire situation could be handled without significantly increasing PM dues. You can't decrease the value of a product, and then expect your customers to pay the exact same amount. Do you see what I mean? It doesn't matter that we weren't guaranteed Google Maps. Let me give you an example. You always buy Goodwill tires. They just switched to a new eco-friendly compound that didn't raise or lower their operating costs, it's just eco friendly. It also didn't raise the price of the tires. You don't care because you weren't paying for the molecular structure of the rubber, just the quality of the Goodwill product, and the price didn't change. Well now you find out that the new compound has the tendency to spontaneously combust, and Goodwill knew that. You weren't ever paying for a particular molecular compound, that wasn't part of the price built into the rubber, but you sure as heck won't pay the same amount for a crappier product! That's what is happening here. They changed a small piece of the puzzle that didn't change operating costs, but lowered the perceived value of their product. Why would I pay $30 for a crappier product?

Due to the costs involved, not only would they have to limit it to PMs, but PM price would double or triple or more. That's complete speculation. You don't know the amount of PMs and until that number is made known, saying that costs would "double or triple or more" is speculation.

If I am reading Google's new pricing structure correctly, and if Geocaching.com really uses 2,000,000 map loads per day, then the cost would be US $8-10k per day. How many premium members are there? Divide $10,000 by the members and you get the cost per member per day. How many premium members will there be after the price hike? Lather, rinse, repeat. Your logic doesn't really hold water. Right now Premium Members are paying $30/year for what? Pocket Queries? Access to their Statistics tab? I don't pay $30/year because I like PQs and Stats, I pay because I like this game and it's the best way for me to monetarily contribute to Groundspeak as a "thanks". In contrast, I pay ~$96/year for access to Netflix Instant Watch, and it's not nearly as much fun as what Groundspeak has to offer me via Geocaching. I think you're severely overestimating how many people would leave if they raised the Premium Membership cost. In terms of keeping the Google API, I think $10 more/member would do it, and I don't think we'd see a 33% drop in Premium Members to negate the price hike. "I was paying $30/year to do Pocket Queries and look at my Cache Matrix, but now they want $40! No way!" ... I really don't think you'd hear this from 1 in 3 premium members.

Do you really think it is as low as 8,000 premium members??? Even if only 2% of cachers (5 million, according to the homepage) signed up for a premium membership, we're talking about 100K. I've only been doing this for 18 months, so maybe I'm overestimating the popularity...? At 2,000,000 clicks per day, with 5,000,000 registered users, that's 0.4 clicks per registered user, per day. At 8,000 Premium Members, they could restrict Google Map access to Premium only and reduce the average Google hits to 3,200 clicks/day. There would need to be at least 62,500 Premium Members to reach the 25,000 daily clicks at that 0.4 clicks/day. If we had just 63,000 members (1.3% of the registered users, but enough to pass the 25,000 daily click limit), with an operating cost of $8,000/day for the Google API, that would come out to an increase in dues of $46.47 per member per year, or $3.87/month. I know that to me, it would be worth another $3.87/month ($0.13/day) to have access to a far superior API. But I think there are far more than 63,000 Premium Members. I would be very impressed to see Groundspeak operate on a gross income of $1.9 million.

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From the Huffington Post: "According to Apple Insider, the company says the charge will only affect .35% of users as websites won't be charged until they get 25,000 Google Maps clicks in one 24-hour period. After they've reached this quota, businesses will be charged $4 per 1,000 clicks according to BBC News." So, if my math serves me right, according to Groundspeak's estimate of 2,000,000 hits per day, we're talking about $8,000 per day in fees to Google, or approaching $3,000,000 per year. Only Groundspeak knows the number of premium members, but they tell us there are over 5 million registered cachers. If you assume only 10% are premium members (high? low?), you would be talking about a $6.00 increase per year to cover the cost of the Google service. I'd pay it. Of course, I would think that there would be ways to greatly limit that number of hits by changing the default, only giving Google Maps to premium members, etc. This, this, and this!!! A thousand times, this!!! There are so many other solutions rather than rolling out this turd of an update. Up the Premium cost $5 and only allow Premium members to access Google Maps, for one. This OSM garbage is terrible. From a Wikipedia article on CloudMade: "CloudMade recorded a loss for 2008 of £1,426,585, with a loss for 2009 of a further £2,149,259. On October 5, 2010, OpenStreetMap founder and CloudMade cofounder Steve Coast resigned from all positions within the company. In November, Steve announced that he had accepted a position as Principal Architect at Microsoft's Bing Mobile." Looks like we just jumped onto a sinking ship with both feet. Please give us the opportunity to choose to pay for a superior product.

Hate it. I couldn't care less about a more detailed OSM Street map when all I use is the satellite view. These new maps are slow and won't refresh correctly. There is no scale on the map, i.e. 1 in = 100 ft. Also, this might just be my imagination, but it doesn't seem to have as close of a zoom either. How much more would a Premium Membership cost if it went towards paying for the Google API? Hate the change ... thanks Google.