Accurate map coordinate

Ask for Help
1

For those looking for accurate coordinates, have a look here. I’ve seen there’s an API though I haven’t tried yet, it seems interesting to me.

2

Interesting concept but it appears there API doesn’t convert an address to GPS coordinates and/or their “3 word” GPS URL. Their mobile app does but from the quick look at the API it doesn’t appear that is something they offer.

3

Yes, some of the phrases you can pick from, just from the area within your house’s footprint, can be pretty funny.

4

I went down the IMPORTXML path (combined with my own API Key pray I stay under $200 per month) and pull coordinates in nicely now from Google’s API. Should probably have used Mapbox, I’d guess it’s cheaper… but for now that’ll do as I don’t foresee costs creeping up just yet.

6

I’m assuming you mean $20???

7

:smirk: You had me worried for a moment… so went and checked the billing limit. $200 USD it is. :+1:

Pay-As-You-Go Pricing

The Geocoding API uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model.

How usage and billing work under the pay-as-you-go model

  • The Google Maps Platform APIs are billed by SKU.
  • Usage is tracked for each Product SKU, and an API may have more than one Product SKU.
  • Cost is calculated by: SKU Usage x Price per each use.
  • For each billing account, for qualifying Google Maps Platform SKUs, a $200 USD Google Maps Platform credit is available each month, and automatically applied to the qualifying SKUs.
8

I was just thinking giving Glide $20 a month to handle geocoding, unless you’re unhappy with Mapbox results or doing a large amount of geocoding.

9

Ahh gotcha! It could scale to be the later… so it makes more sense for me to wear the ‘cost’ for the geocoding… until it doesn’t. :wink:

1 Like
10

Fair enough. :+1:

11

Hi Jeff,

Just remembering this conversation of me talking about using the Google Maps API… somehow I did 60,000 requests last month (investigating now) and busted through the free tier.

I need to investigate how often these requests are being done on the sheets (about 200/300 lines currently) and understand how this is happening.

Suffice to say, I’ve turned off the use of the Google Maps API… for now. :wink:

12

I imagine every time something changes in the sheet or on Google sheet’s auto recalc schedule, it causes a reload of the importxml and and API call for each row each time it recalcs.

I would maybe look into some sort of script that runs off of the onChange trigger that will call the api only when a column in your sheet is empty. Once the value is filled, the script will still run and loop through all rows, but will skip any rows that are already geocoded.

1 Like
13

I went down that rabbit hole and got a little more than baffled with all the script options… so eased back out for expediencies sake (and my own sanity). For now I’ve just settled back into manually running a batch geocode script. An unscalable solution but one that does the job for now. :+1:

1 Like
14

I use a map pattern, but the location seller that appears is different in country and also sometimes in different cities and can’t see it with close range radius, i have difficult to access my possition, and also slow loading buffer. Is there a way to be better?

15

Try to use coordinates instead of addresses to solve the first issue, for the latter verify if you browser (safari on ios and chrome on android) has permission to use your gps position.