Introducing Plaza
The geospatial API market has a problem. If you’ve built anything that touches maps, geocoding, or routing, you already know what I’m talking about.
Google Maps charges obscene prices and increases them without warning. A startup with moderate geocoding traffic can easily face a five-figure monthly bill. Their pricing model punishes growth — the more successful your product, the more they take. And they know you’re locked in.
Mapbox offers better pricing but wraps everything in restrictive licensing. Want to cache results? Want to use the data in ways they didn’t anticipate? Their licensing terms add friction for common use cases. Licensing shouldn’t slow down a simple integration.
Geocode.earth is a step in the right direction with its open-data philosophy, but the feature set is limited. Need routing? Isochrones? Batch geocoding? You’ll be stitching together multiple providers and maintaining glue code forever.
None of these meet developers where they are.
What is Plaza?
Section titled “What is Plaza?”Plaza is a full-featured geospatial data API. The full OpenStreetMap planet, curated open datasets, and your own custom data — all behind a single API with consistent conventions and honest pricing. Geocoding, reverse geocoding, routing, isochrones, distance matrices, map matching, route optimization, search, and more.
We’re not just wrapping existing open-source tools and calling it a day. We contributed a bidirectional GiST index and performance improvements to h3-pg, the open-source H3 extension for Postgres, which lets us query billions of geographic features with sub-50ms response times. It’s the reason Plaza can serve all its data sources through a single API without the fleet of specialized services that other providers need.
We also ship an MCP server (@plazafyi/mcp) so any AI agent with MCP support — Claude, GPT, open-source models — can geocode, route, and query places out of the box. You can cache results, store them in vector databases, and use them in AI pipelines without restrictions.
Why now?
Section titled “Why now?”A few things lined up to make this the right time:
Open data has matured. OpenStreetMap’s coverage and quality have improved enormously over the past decade, and governments and organizations are publishing more geospatial data than ever. The data foundation is there.
Infrastructure costs have dropped. What would have required a warehouse of servers ten years ago now runs on modern cloud infrastructure. We can offer performance that competes with Google at a fraction of the cost because the economics are different now.
Developer expectations have changed. Developers expect APIs that are well-documented, predictable, and fair. SDKs that work, error messages that help, and pricing that doesn’t require a spreadsheet to understand.
AI needs a geospatial layer. Every LLM-powered agent that interacts with the physical world needs to geocode, route, search, and answer spatial questions. But the APIs they’re calling weren’t built for this. Self-hosting OSM is operationally complex, and most commercial APIs restrict caching. We built a geospatial API that’s fast, cacheable, and designed for AI workflows from day one.
The backstory
Section titled “The backstory”I’ve been working with geospatial and civic data for over a decade. I previously founded Stae, where we built open data platforms for local governments — helping cities like Atlanta and Jersey City standardize, share, and actually use their infrastructure data. Before that, I started the Code for Phoenix civic tech brigade, where 30+ engineers volunteered to make municipal data accessible.
At Stae, I saw firsthand how fragmented the geospatial data ecosystem is. Cities were paying steep licensing fees for basic geocoding. Developers building civic tools were priced out by Google’s API costs. Open-source alternatives existed but were fragmented and hard to operate at scale.
After Stae, I spent time at Apple working on AI and security. Building systems at that scale changed how I think about infrastructure, performance, and what’s possible when you invest in doing things right.
Plaza is the product of all of these experiences. It’s what I wished existed every time I saw a city, a startup, or an independent developer get locked into a mapping API they couldn’t afford to leave.
What we believe
Section titled “What we believe”- Geospatial data should be accessible. No lock-in, no surprises.
- Pricing should be honest. Predictable, designed so that your success doesn’t become your biggest expense.
- Developer experience matters. Type-safe SDKs, comprehensive docs, and an API that behaves the way you’d expect.
- Performance is not optional. Fast by default, not “fast for an open-source alternative.”
- AI should understand the real world. Geospatial data for agents should be fast, cacheable, and affordable — not priced to make AI applications unviable.
Try it
Section titled “Try it”Plaza is live today. Create an account, grab an API key, and start building. Check out our getting started guide or jump straight into the API reference.
We’re just getting started. If you have questions, ideas, or just want to say hi — reach out.