Every developer has hit this wall. You're building an app. You need a city search dropdown, or postal code validation, or timezone detection. Simple stuff. You look at Google Maps Platform pricing. You close the tab. That's why I built LocalityAPI.
The Problem With Existing Solutions
Google Maps Platform is comprehensive but expensive. $5 per 1,000 Place Autocomplete requests. $17 per 1,000 Geocoding requests. For a startup doing 100,000 requests per month that's $500-1,700 monthly just for location data. Before you've made a dollar.
Free alternatives exist but come with serious tradeoffs. GeoNames has the data but the API is unreliable and the documentation is from 2009. IP geolocation APIs give you approximate city from IP but can't search by name. Most 'free geocoding APIs' are wrappers around OpenStreetMap Nominatim with strict rate limits and no SLA.
Self-hosting is possible but means downloading and maintaining 100GB+ of planet data, setting up PostGIS, writing your own API layer, and hoping nothing breaks on a Sunday night. There had to be a better way.
