It’s best to start using the service at the S0 free tier, taking advantage of lower costs if you exceed the free monthly quota. If you want more than 50 queries a second, things do get more expensive, with the S1 service adding enterprise routing features and satellite imagery, at $5 per 1,000 transactions. Once you move beyond the free tier, low-volume services cost $0.50 per 1,000 transactions (with the geolocation preview costing $0.25 per 1,000 transactions). Azure Maps’s fata comes from TomTom, an alternative to Bing Maps’s use of Here.Īzure Maps’s pricing starts with the introductory S0 free tier that offers 250,000 basic mapping and traffic transactions a month, with an additional 5,000 time-zone queries and 25,000 queries across all its other services, limited to fewer than 50 queries a second. All of that is required Azure Maps to duplicate much of Bing’s functionality, with geocoding, geolocation, traffic, and complex routing algorithms that go beyond basic point-to-point routing. While those seem simple enough, those three requirements have their own dependencies that make building out a mapping service a large and complex task.

Location-aware applications need a few key functions: to search for locations, to display maps, and to route users between locations. With new partnerships, an enterprise focus, and a growing number of new features, Azure Maps is starting to become a useful option for anyone wanting to add mapping capabilities to a site or service especially after Google’s recent pricing changes. They use mapping data from different partners, and they have different pricing models. They’re very similar, and while Bing Maps has more features, Azure Maps is catching up fast. There’s a dilemma facing anyone wanting to build a map app on a Microsoft platform: The company currently has two mapping APIs, one that uses Bing, and one that’s built on Azure.

Bing street view