Why TravelTime is anti-consumption-based pricing

At first sight, consumption-based API pricing seems really appealing. "Pay only for what you use"—it's simple, intuitive, and feels fair.

At a small scale, it genuinely works: minimal API usage, minimal cost. However, this simplicity quickly becomes a trap as your business scales.

At TravelTime, we do things differently. We believe your technology should scale with you and it should continue to deliver the performance, accuracy and reliability your business needs, without costs skyrocketing.

We always have been (and always will be) anti consumption-based API pricing.

Here, we’ll explain why that is and how it empowers organisations to build with complete freedom.

When your team or application grows beyond a certain point, the freedom promised by consumption-based pricing transforms into fear—the fear of unpredictable, escalating bills. This fear inevitably imposes controls that stifle innovation, creativity, and performance. Teams become hesitant to experiment, worried about exceeding budgets or incurring unanticipated charges.

Consumption pricing sounds limitless. But that's by design. The meter is always running, and your API partner is never genuinely invested in delivering value.

Instead, you're tethered to a vendor who’s tracking your usage and billing you for every action you take. Their profits grow as your ambition as business grows, making your success beneficial primarily to them, not you.

We don’t think that’s right.

This problem is especially severe in the location services industry. Every single geocode, map tile request, route calculation, or travel time computation costs money.

Initially harmless, these incremental charges become oppressive at scale when processing thousands or even millions of locations every single day.

Consumption-based pricing creates hidden limits—not set by your ambitions or creativity, but by procurement-imposed budget ceilings. Suddenly, your team's innovation is limited by finances rather than vision. Development stalls, and groundbreaking solutions are left unexplored because each attempt comes with an immediate financial penalty.

Consumption pricing is deceptively simple for vendors—track usage, multiply, invoice. Easy to implement but costly for the buyer. It’s not structured to empower your business; it's designed to monetise your success, turning your growth into increased vendor revenue, not mutual partnership.

Even seemingly low unit prices can quickly become prohibitive. Whether it's compute resources, APIs, or data services, consumption pricing punishes repeated use and discourages the development of core components of modern, scalable solutions like continuous optimisation or machine learning.

To twist the knife, vendors also often don’t allow for caching. This means API users must continuously re-use APIs to perform the same action, further driving up costs.

From day one, TravelTime was built differently.

We didn't just want to match existing services—we aimed to surpass them. Our fixed, unlimited pricing model eliminates the fear of surprise bills, empowering your team to innovate without restraint.

With TravelTime, processing potentially billions of locations daily is no longer a financial gamble. It’s a given. You know exactly what you'll pay, every month, regardless of usage. No overages, no hidden costs—just straightforward, predictable pricing.

TravelTime customers have the freedom to build applications they cannot build with APIs that price by consumption.

Whether that’s improving the accuracy of location matching relevancy in online marketplaces, performing spatial analysis, training machine learning models at global scale, or in house route optimisation, our fixed price removes the fear of growth and turns into a superpower.

TravelTime rejects the so-called "limitless" claims of consumption-based pricing, recognising them for what they truly are: carefully disguised financial handcuffs.

By removing these limits, TravelTime enables genuine freedom. Your developers, engineers, and data scientists can build and innovate confidently, without compromise or constraint.

Our API pricing ethos is simple yet powerful:

• Predictability: Know your exact cost, always.
• Freedom: Innovate without the fear of financial repercussions.
• Partnership: A transparent, aligned model built for your success—not just benefiting from it.

Break free from consumption-based pricing. Build without compromise with TravelTime.

Discuss your API needs with our team to get a custom fixed price. Or get started with the API for free.