Dear Community,
On behalf of the MyRoute-app team, I would like to inform you that after ceasing negotiations with Google, we have decided to reduce the Google Maps service. I will explain the time frame and total impact of this, as well as our availability for questions.
Let's start at the beginning. Just like any other company, MyRoute-app has contracts with various partners who provide all kinds of services. Take a look in the application and you can probably already list some of them. Generally, we do not draw your, our community's, attention to this as contract negotiations, licence fees and life-cycle management is generally of little interest to you, the users. What is relevant in this case is that MyRoute-app concludes multi-year contracts that are renegotiated with suppliers at the end of the period, often in pleasant collaboration and ongoing partnerships.
These negotiations go beyond market negotiations. It's about more than the stress field between a low price for us and a high price for the supplier. This is a mutually fruitful collaboration that stimulates sustainable innovation. Our suppliers benefit if MyRoute-app grows: then our demand for their services also grows. We benefit from our suppliers flourishing: they offer better and more attractive services, so we do not have to develop this ourselves as a custom-made service. With MyRoute-app, quality comes first, which can sometimes cost a little more when the quality justifies it.
In February 2020, negotiations started for a follow-up contract with Google. To our surprise, the prices offered here were ten times higher than the previous prices. It should be noted that those prices had already been unilaterally increased by Google as early as 2018. The 2018 price hike was not only difficult for MyRoute-app as many smaller companies also run their business on Google's infrastructure. The internet is full of stories about small entrepreneurs who, thanks to this price hike, saw their costs rise from, for example, €10,000 to €200,000 per period. Fortunately, MyRoute-app was able to deal with this in an agile manner and at the time expanded Google Maps as a standard map service with an emergency measure and switched to the free open source alternative OpenStreetMap. In the end, many companies died in a growing economy due to nothing else but the fact that Google shot up its prices back then.
So, we refused to accept the new Google prices. We tried to achieve new prices with Google that were workable but to no avail at the bottom of the line. Google's attitude towards our proposals was rigid; counter proposals and questions for clarity were met with radio silence. We have done our best to think from the perspective of our supplier, as we often do. We understand that large companies like to work with scales and standard processes. We understand that justified price rises are possible. We understand that a company wants to grow. However, this does not detract from the fact that Google simply was not open to negotiating with MyRoute-app. That can easily happen, after all, we were already customers. We had already become customers since 2014 under a reasonable graduated scale, with a supplier who worked together with us and increased the price indexed as befits a growing economy. However, recent price hikes are unworkable and unjustified.
Google's services will not be 20 times better in 2018. It has not improved tenfold in 2020 and as far as we can tell, life has not become 30 times more expensive and wages have not increased thirty-fold. In the short term, MyRoute-app will therefore bid farewell to various Google services. This will disable the maps functionality for GOLD users. Furthermore, routes once created via Google Maps will all be converted to the Here map. The Google Maps map remains available as an additional map layer. We believe that this reduction of Google functionality will not have a major impact on the overall offering. For proper exportation to the known GPS devices, we advise that you use Here (Garmin) and TomTom maps, in any case the map material is the same. The map with all Google information will remain available, we are only forced to distance ourselves from the Google route calculation.
Finally, I would like to end with the message that things can be done differently. As I mentioned earlier, MyRoute-app has contracts with several partners. As such, we have recently renewed the life cycle of these contracts with all critical partners in a sustainable and collaborative way. We are proud of the partners with whom we have been able to develop MyRoute-app to the maturity level we now stand at and once again express our confidence in building a bright future for all travellers.
Thanks for reading.
On behalf of the MyRoute-app team,
Your Community Manager,
Timo Martosatiman
, I have never met one. 
