I’m a full-stack web developer. This story started quite predictably: we bought my nephew some Chinese tracking watches, but they usually kicked the bucket by the second week of operation:) I thought to myself, "Why not build my own app? He’s getting a smartphone soon anyway."
I figured a $1.50-2/month subscription would be a sweet spot for parents. The plan was a minimalist app: 5 geofences, entry/exit notifications, real-time location for one child, 30-day history, and mandatory battery optimization based on SLC (Significant Location Change).
I checked the competition in the app stores—average subscriptions are around $9, with one outlier at $3. I figured, "Easy enough. Just need to find a decent geocoding API, and I'm golden."
Looking for an Affordable Geocoding API...
For 1 million requests, the most "suitable" option on RapidAPI was $45 (for 2M requests). For a startup, that felt a bit steep. And the main question: why should I pay for the whole world when I only need one country? It didn't look like a "cheap reverse geocoding service" to me. For $15, I would have subscribed without a second thought and started coding "My-Kid-Tracker" immediately.
I did the math. For 1,000 users generating about 1.5M requests daily, here’s the 2026 market landscape:
| Provider | Monthly Cost | Highlights |
|---|---|---|
| Google Maps | ~$547 | $0.38 per 1,000 requests. Just the API; map tiles cost extra. |
| Mapbox | $816 | For 1.48M geocoding requests. |
| OpenCage | ~$450 | "Medium" tier pricing. |
| LocationIQ | $200 | One of the cheapest, but has strict RPS limits. |
| Radar | ~$750 | Enterprise-focused, ~$0.50 per 1,000 requests. |
If I went with LocationIQ’s $45 tier, the math per child looks like this:
• Active time: 14 hours (07:00 – 21:00).
• Interval: Once every 15 minutes = 4 requests per hour.
• Total: $14 * 4 = 56$ requests/day per child.
The tier limit is 10,000 requests/day.
10,000 / 56 = 178 users
Sounds okay, right? But add 5 geofences per kid, and the limit drops to 35 users. Breakeven starts at $6+ per user. Plus, the morning "school rush" might create an RPS spike that would require complex queuing logic.
If You Want It Done Right, Self-Host It
I dug deeper. AI suggested: "Photon with OpenStreetMap-based geocoding." No limits, full infrastructure control. That’s when the lightbulb went on: why not become a geo-provider for North America myself? Create two tiers: ultra-cheap and high-RPS.
I asked myself:
Is it possible to build a self-sustaining, enterprise-grade geo-API with 99.99% uptime, serving 20 clients at $15/month for 2M requests with high precision for the US, Canada, and Mexico?
Originally, we considered a standard HA setup with two VPS gateways and Keepalived, but we decided to offload that complexity to the edge using Cloudflare Load Balancing. Our final architecture uses a Small-VPS and Bare Metal hybrid distributed across US East and West coasts to ensure geo-redundancy and low latency. Cloudflare handles the health checks and instant failover, rerouting traffic automatically if a region or server hiccups, effectively eliminating any Single Point of Failure (SPOF). By running identical Photon/OSM stacks on dedicated hardware, we’ve pushed our reliability toward a 99.995% enterprise-ready claim. To cover even the worst-case scenarios, one VPS gateway serves as an "all-in-one" shadow server that can take the full load if the bare metal clusters ever go dark. And let’s be honest: if Cloudflare itself fails (again), half the internet is going down with us anyway, and architecting for that particular apocalypse is a topic for another day.
I’m being honest with you—I don’t promise 99.999%. But I’ve built a system that survives a server crash, a data center outage, or a RAM error. 52 minutes of possible downtime per year versus thousands of dollars in savings—isn’t that the "Best reverse geocoding API for startups"?
On the software side, I considered FastAPI, but I didn't want to wrestle with worker management. I also didn't want to lose sleep over memory leaks in Octane. So, I stuck to a classic, stable stack: Slim 4 + PHP-FPM. The gateway just works, delivering responses in milliseconds. If we hit massive scale, Python or more hardware will be the answer.
Why Only North America?
I believe trying to please everyone and cover the whole world is what chokes startups. By focusing exclusively on the US, Canada, and Mexico, I’ve optimized the index size and response speed. If there were a high-quality US endpoint on RapidAPI for $10–$15, I would never have descended into these DevOps trenches.
Speaking of "Honest Pricing"
When I tried to list the Ultra plan on RapidAPI for $15 for 2 million requests, I hit a wall: the platform technically forbids setting a price lower than $0.0000225 per request for high-volume plans.
The minimum price the system allowed me to set was $76 for 3 million requests. I chose 3M to make it simple for the user: that’s exactly 100,000 requests per day (slightly more than 1 request per second, averaged over a month). It’s still significantly cheaper than Google or Mapbox, but my inner perfectionist is annoyed. My roadmap now includes building a custom limiter and payment gateway to bypass these "marketplace taxes."
Looking for Pioneers
I’m looking for early adopters to stress-test the system. To make it worth your while, I’ve unlocked a Pioneer-friendly Free Tier on RapidAPI: 1,000 requests every single day with a massive 25 RPS limit.
Link to my Geokodia API on RapidAPI
Most free geocoders throttle you to death with 1 request per second. I want you to actually test your logic, check the latency, and see how it handles North American data at speed. If you’re building a startup, handling logistics, or just tired of Google Maps invoices—grab your key and push my infrastructure to the limit. And when I launch direct billing, I’ll make sure my "Pioneers" get a legacy deal that’s even sweeter.
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