About two years ago I hacked together a side project (https://bennettfeely.com/antiweather) that compares the weather at your location and the exact opposite point on Earth.<p>It uses the (affordable) Dark Sky API to get the weather forecast at two antipodes and Google's Reverse Geocoding API to simply get the geographic name of a coordinate.<p>The project was live then but never received much traffic until it was posted on /r/InternetIsBeautiful yesterday.<p>Now I see I am being charged a little over $1,000 from Google for using their API.<p>I wish I kept a closer eye on the fact Google jacked up the price of their APIs since I released Antiweather two years ago.<p>Maybe someone can help me understand why it costs 50x more to simply get the name of a location (Google) than it does to get detailed weather conditions and forecast for any point on Earth (Dark Sky).<p>I don't feel much hope of finding a way around this surprise bill but I am posting here for any advice at all. Is there any chance at forgiveness for a recent college grad whose side project unintentionally went viral, anyone to contact?
Have you considered asking the moderators of /r/InternetIsBeautiful if you could make a post explaining what happened and asking for some crowd funding?
A free OpenStreetMap based alternative you could use to keep it running in the future:<p><a href="http://photon.komoot.de/" rel="nofollow">http://photon.komoot.de/</a><p><a href="http://photon.komoot.de/reverse?lon=10&lat=52" rel="nofollow">http://photon.komoot.de/reverse?lon=10&lat=52</a>
First of all, congratulations! That's really exciting!<p>This is a costly mistake to learn, but to offer a bit of hope, at my last start-up we accidentally racked up high costs on the location API. Our CEO hopped on the phone with them a few times and was able to get the bill down. Good luck!
First, find a cheaper API that accomplishes the same goal. Second, email Google billing and see if they're willing to give a discount considering the accidental and non-commercial nature of the charge.
Call Google and I'm sure they'll sort it out<p>Oh wait, that's not the way Google does support. What you should do is get someone with lots of twitter followers to tweet @google until someone notices this and solves it for you.<p>Not everyone has enough followers to activate this channel, but surely you know someone who works at Google or has 100k followers?
Nope, you should have anticipated & used better alternatives. Just apply the same in the real world & you'll see how your approach changes.