I tried to fix loneliness. I ended up building a Places API 200x cheaper than Google.

Alexander — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 08:48:07 +0000

A couple of years ago, a friend came up with an idea that I still think is worth pursuing.

Moving to a new city is hard. Not because of logistics — but because of the quiet. You have a great coffee shop downstairs, a pool table two blocks away, and zero people to share it with. Dating apps exist. Friend apps don't, not really.

So the three of us built one. The pitch: open the app, see people nearby in cafes and bars who are openly up for a chat, a language exchange, a game of pool. No awkward matching, no swiping — just proximity and intent. A modern Foursquare, but for human connection instead of check-ins.

We built it. We shipped it. And then we completely failed at marketing. The product worked. The growth didn't. Classic indie story.

The technical leftover

One thing stuck with me from that project: the data layer.

Early on we used OpenStreetMap. It's incredible for what it is — but the POI data is inconsistent, incomplete in non-English speaking regions, and hard to work with at scale. Midway through we switched to Overture Maps — an open dataset backed by Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and TomTom — and never looked back.

After the startup wound down, I kept thinking about Overture. The dataset had grown to 80+ million places worldwide. The license — CDLA Permissive 2.0 — has zero commercial restrictions. And yet almost nobody was serving it through a clean, affordable API.

The Google Places problem

If you've ever built a location-based feature, you know the pain.

Google Places API charges $17 per 1,000 requests for Place Details. Nearby Search is $32 per 1,000. For a startup running 500,000 requests a month, that's $8,500–$16,000. Monthly. Before you've found product-market fit.

The result? Developers either cripple their apps with aggressive caching, avoid the feature entirely, or burn through their Google credit and get an unexpected invoice.

There had to be a better way.

What I built

I spent a few weeks building a REST API on top of the Overture Places dataset, written in Rust with Axum and PostGIS on the backend.

Two endpoints:

Nearby search — find places within a radius, optionally filtered by category:

GET /api/places/nearby?lat=40.71&lon=-74.00&radius=500&category=restaurant

Search by name or brand — find all locations of a specific business:

GET /api/places/search?lat=40.71&lon=-74.00&radius=2000&q=starbucks

This one searches across both name and brand fields simultaneously, so you don't have to know how Overture classifies a particular chain.

Each response includes coordinates, name, category, address, operating status, phones, websites, social links, and emails.

The numbers

Google Places charges $17 per 1,000 requests for Place Details, and $32 for Nearby Search. Commercial use comes with restrictions, and overage bills are a common surprise.

This API starts at $0.10 per 1,000 requests, Nearby Search is included, the license has zero commercial restrictions, and overages are soft — $0.05 per 1,000 if you exceed your plan.

Plans on RapidAPI:

Basic — free, 5,000 requests/month
Pro — $10/month, 100,000 requests
Ultra — $30/month, 500,000 requests
Mega — $80/month, 2,000,000 requests

The Pro plan at $10/month for 100,000 requests — Google would charge $1,700 for the same volume.

The honest part

The data isn't perfect. Overture is updated monthly, not in real-time. In some regions — especially smaller cities outside Western Europe and North America — coverage is thinner than Google's.

If you need reviews, photos, real-time open/closed status, or Google's autocomplete quality — this isn't a replacement. It's an alternative for the use cases where you just need POI data and coordinates, and you don't want to pay Google's prices to get them.

What's next

The API started as a side project for the social app. But honestly, I'm not done with that original idea either. The loneliness problem is real, and I still think proximity-based social has legs — just needs a different approach to growth than what we tried.

For now, the Places API is live on RapidAPI. Free tier available.

And if you're building something in the location space and want to talk — I'm always up for that conversation.

Built solo, with Rust, PostGIS, and too much coffee.