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What is a Distance Matrix API?
A Distance Matrix API is a web service that calculates the distances and journey times between a set of origins and destinations.
Use cases for a distance matrix are incredibly broad, from fleet optimisation to gravity modeling to B2C search applications. The number of different providers in the market is also very extensive, from Google to Mapbox to TravelTime, all offering similar features and functionality.
There are many providers offering similar products to meet these different application areas, often with slightly different features that can be hard to disentangle to work out how they stack up against one another.
However, there are two key areas to consider:
- Usage limits: What size matrices can you generate, and how quickly?
- Pricing: How much does it cost to generate matrices of different sizes?
Usage Limit Considerations for Distance Matrix APIs
For usage limits, restrictions normally come in two forms:
- The number of locations that can be included in a matrix
- The number requests that can be made to the API in a given period, usually per minute
In other words, how big can a single matrix be, and how quickly can you make multiple matrices?
Distance Matrix API Pricing Considerations
For pricing, Distance Matrix API providers typically offer:
- A free tier
- Variable pricing based on the number of ‘elements’ used
Occasionally, a provider will calculate their own unit to price on (e.g. “Elements / 2”) but the general idea is the same - the more data you need, the more you pay.
An element is a single result in a matrix i.e. the distance and/or travel time between one origin and one destination. For example, a matrix with 1 origin and 1,000 destinations would be 1,000 elements (1 x 1,000), while a matrix with 10 origins and 20 destinations would be 200 elements (10 x 20).
Usage Based Pricing vs. TravelTime’s Unlimited Usage Pricing
TravelTime is the only provider in the market that does not price on elements (or a metric related to elements).
Instead, we offer fixed monthly pricing and unlimited usage. This means you can generate as many matrices as you need without worrying about variable costs, offering a predictable and cost-effective solution.
Chat to our team to discover your tailored fixed monthly price.
Comparing Distance Matrix API Providers: Google, Mapbox and More
To compare the different providers, we’re going to consider two typical applications of a Distance Matrix API, but covering different use cases and usage profiles:
- A consumer-facing search application that will involve lots of one-to-many matrices
- A route scheduling application that will involve building large many-to-many matrices
Interested in understanding how to make a distance matrix and calculate times to multiple locations? Explore our tutorial here.
Scenario 1: Using a Distance Matrix API on a Consumer-Facing Application
In the first scenario, we operate a web application that allows users to search for jobs near to where they live.
Each time a visitor searches the site, a one-to-many matrix is generated, calculating the distances and journey times between their home location and the locations of all available jobs on the site that match the search criteria, for example the job title and salary.
The site gets 100,000 visitors per month, each conducting a single job search. There are on average 2,000 live job postings that meet a typical search. This means that each month we need to use a Distance Matrix API to generate 100,000 matrices, each of size 1 x 2,000.
| Search Scenario Price per month |
Maximum One-To-Many Matrix Size | Maximum Requests per minute |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| TravelTime | Unlimited elements for a fixed monthly price | 100,000 | 60 |
| $799,900 | 100 | 600 | |
| Mapbox | $240,400 | 25 | 60 |
| TomTom | $4,000,000 | 200 | 10 |
| Bing | Not publicly available | 625 | Unknown |
| OpenRouteService | Not possible with maximum allowed usage | 50 | 40 |
| Nextbillion.ai | $151,050 | 5,000 | 6,000 |
| Graphhopper | Not possible with maximum allowed usage | 150 | 50,000 credits per day* |
The table above shows how much this scenario would cost using the different Distance Matrix API providers per month. For consistency, where multiple plans are available, we have taken the highest available plan that is published publicly.
Scenario 2: Using a Distance Matrix API for a Routing Application
In our second scenario, our company has a fleet of 50 service engineers, who between them conduct on average 1,250 customer home visits each week.
At the start of each week, we build a schedule of visits for each engineer based on an efficient routing calculation. To do so, we need to know the driving times from each engineer to each customer home, and from each customer home to each other customer home.
The calculations we make at the start of each week are:
- A matrix of each engineer to each customer (50 x 1,250)
- A matrix of each customer to each customer (1,250 x 1,250)
| Big Data Scenario Price per month |
Time Required minutes |
|
|---|---|---|
| TravelTime | Unlimited elements for a fixed monthly price | 5 |
| $25,900 | 27 | |
| Mapbox | $8,200 | 1,082 |
| TomTom | $200 | 232 |
| Bing | Not publicly available | Unknown (2,600 requests required) |
| OpenRouteService | Not possible with maximum allowed usage | Not possible with maximum allowed usage |
| Nextbillion.ai | $6,925 | 1* |
| Graphhopper | $384 | Not possible with maximum allowed usage |
The table above is a breakdown of how much this would cost for the different Distance Matrix API providers per month. We’ve also taken the usage limits to calculate how long it would take to get the required amount of data.
Want to dive deeper into how TravelTime compares to Google? Read more here.
What Do These Results Mean for Distance Matrix API Pricing?
The comparisons of usage limits and pricing can be looked at separately, but it often makes more sense to assess a provider by looking at both together.
If you are looking for a provider to power a location-based search on a web application, then the very high limits provided by Nextbillion.ai (6,000 requests per minute) look incredibly appealing. However, when we look at the cost of such high concurrency, it becomes apparent that this is unlikely to be affordable, coming in at over $150,000 per month just to power 100,000 searches in our job site example in Scenario 1.
Similarly, if you want to use a Distance Matrix API to power a route scheduling application, looking solely at cost makes TomTom appear to be an attractive option. However, when we consider that for synchronous requests, there is a limit of 200 locations per request and a maximum of 10 requests per minute, it turns out that to run the calculations you would take over 12 hours each week.
Read our API response time comparison here.
Choosing a Distance Matrix API Provider
When choosing between the different Distance Matrix API providers, the features and functionality on offer are often broadly similar. But the biggest differences come in around pricing and usage limits.
When making your decision, we advise that you map out what sort of usage you are expecting to see, read the documentation, and pick a provider that meets your requirements in terms of both usage and budget.
Ready to Try TravelTime?
TravelTime is built for high-volume users focused on performance and data accuracy. It is the only provider to offer unlimited usage for a fixed monthly cost.
It’s more cost-effective than other Distance Matrix API providers, without compromising speed.
If you’re a developer, you can get started with a free API key.
Or chat to our team to understand what your fixed monthly price could be and see how TravelTime will support your distance matrix needs.