MapPoint Web service pricing structure

Hello,
I'm building a small website that requires routing and mapping. I checked on the MapPoint premium web service price and it was $15,000.00 just to set it up. This bought, I think, 50,000 hits. This is far more than I need and the set up price far exceeds what I can afford. Are there any other sustainable options beyond the 30 day trial and the 1 year free with MSDN? A pure per-use option would be fantastic or perhaps a collective of small site users such as myself that each pay on a per-hit basis.
Thanks,
Jeff
jeffwsmith@hotmail.com

Hello,

We will be adding the ability to buy groups of low volume transactions. For details you can contact a MapPoint Sales Specialist at maplic@microsoft.com or (800) 426-9400, extension 11315.


Steven Pushee

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You assume all risk for your use. © 2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights
reserved.

Has this been put in place yet?

Surely you jest.

That's US$0.30c per query. More established competitors are charging closer to US$0.04 - and that's at low volumes (< 20,000 / mo).

Either MP has something spectacular to offer that I haven't seen yet or I hope you left out a zero in there somewhere.

Quoted from Steve Lombardi:

"Pricing really hasn't changed: still platform access starts at $8,000 per year. For this amount an organization gets ½ million transactions on the Web Service. For higher volume applications where they need more than ½ million they can purchase additional transactions in buckets of 100,000 and that starts at about a penny/per transaction and they scale down to about a ½ penny transaction, for higher volume. MapPoint Location Server will be a component of MapPoint Web Service and therefore there will be no extra charge for it. "

-- www.giscafe.com/magazine/index.php?run_date=16-Feb-2004

See also:

www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=522
www.msmobiles.com/article.php/67.html
www.mp2kmag.com/a107--location.server.lombardi.mappoint.html