I am developing an app on with react native, expo, and firebase, and I need to use an api to autocomplete locations when a user types them, but the places API is incredibly expensive. I wanted to know if there were any free or at least far cheaper alternatives to the react-native-google-places-autocomplete package? Ideally it would work with expo and firebase. Any help would be largely appreciated, thank you!
2 Answers
I would suggest you to fork the react-native-google-places-autocomplete package and replace the api calls to Google with another service. Or just write your own code for it.
- Add cooldown before sending API requests and don't query before 4 letters are typed for example to massively reduce api calls.
Alternative API services:
Here geocoding autocomplete https://developer.here.com/documentation/examples/rest/geocoding_suggestions
- Free first 30k searches per month
LocationIQ https://locationiq.com/docs#autocomplete
- Free 5k requests per day
Mapbox geocoding https://docs.mapbox.com/api/search/geocoding/#forward-geocoding
- Free 100k per month
And probably lots of other alternatives that I have not found yet.
I have found an API for this. here is the link to that API https://www.bigdatacloud.com/geocoding-apis/reverse-geocode-to-city-api
monthly 50K requests are free and additional 50K costs only $2 per month.
a package for react-native is react-native-geocoder
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