# Placematic Developer Hub

> Practical guides for HERE Location Services, routing, geocoding, maps, pricing and enterprise geospatial development.

- [Placematic Developer Hub](https://docs.placematic.com/index.md): Implementation guidance for HERE Location Services — choosing APIs, forecasting costs, migrating from Google Maps, and shipping routing systems that survive production.
- [What is HERE Location Services?](https://docs.placematic.com/getting-started/what-is-here-location-services.md): A practical explanation of HERE Location Services for engineers — what the platform actually contains, where it beats Google Maps, and when it's the wrong choice.
- [Getting a HERE API Key](https://docs.placematic.com/getting-started/getting-a-here-api-key.md): How to get a HERE API key — sandbox vs production, what the free tier actually covers, and the entitlement questions to resolve before you start building.
- [HERE Pricing Explained](https://docs.placematic.com/getting-started/here-pricing-explained.md): How HERE API pricing actually works — call volume vs asset-based models, where costs diverge from Google Maps, and how to model your real bill before you commit.
- [Authentication](https://docs.placematic.com/getting-started/authentication.md): How to authenticate against HERE APIs — API keys vs OAuth, key rotation, error codes that matter, and the security mistakes that end up in incident reports.
- [Choosing the Right HERE APIs](https://docs.placematic.com/getting-started/choosing-the-right-here-apis.md): A decision guide for selecting HERE APIs by use case — routing vs matrix vs tour planning, real-time vs batch geocoding, and the expensive mistakes teams make choosing wrong.
- [HERE vs Google Maps – Which Platform Should You Choose?](https://docs.placematic.com/getting-started/here-vs-google-maps.md): An honest comparison of HERE Location Services and Google Maps Platform — where each genuinely wins, what migration actually costs, and when you should not switch.
- [HERE Routing API — Implementation Guide](https://docs.placematic.com/guides/routing.md): How to implement HERE Routing v8 in production — transport modes, request shaping, cost control, and the mistakes that surface only after launch.
- [HERE Truck Routing — Implementation Guide](https://docs.placematic.com/guides/truck-routing.md): Implementing HERE truck routing in production — physical constraints, hazmat classes, trap geometry validation, why a valid response can still be an undrivable route, and how the constraint set compares to Google Large Vehicle Routing.
- [HERE Toll Cost API — Implementation Guide](https://docs.placematic.com/guides/toll-cost.md): Calculate per-route toll charges for commercial vehicles using the HERE Toll Cost extension, including axle count, vehicle class, and transponder handling.
- [HERE Matrix Routing — Implementation Guide](https://docs.placematic.com/guides/matrix-routing.md): Implementing HERE Matrix Routing v8 — sync versus async, region definitions, when one call replaces ten thousand, and the loop that is costing you money right now.
- [HERE EV Routing — Implementation Guide](https://docs.placematic.com/guides/ev-routing.md): Implementing electric vehicle routing with HERE — consumption models, charging stops, the separate EV Charge Points API, and when EV routing is not what you need.
- [HERE Tour Planning — Implementation Guide](https://docs.placematic.com/guides/tour-planning.md): Implementing HERE Tour Planning v3 — the vehicle routing problem, plan and fleet structure, async solving, unassigned jobs, and why looping the routing API is not optimization.
- [HERE Route Matching — Implementation Guide](https://docs.placematic.com/guides/route-matching.md): Map-matching GPS traces to the road network with HERE — why reverse geocoding cannot do this, IFTA and compliance workloads, and the difference between where a vehicle was and where it drove.
- [HERE Geocoding and Search — Implementation Guide](https://docs.placematic.com/guides/geocoding.md): Implementing HERE Geocoding & Search v7 — geocode, autocomplete, autosuggest, discover, batch jobs, and the caching decision that halves most geocoding bills.
- [HERE Reverse Geocoding — Implementation Guide](https://docs.placematic.com/guides/reverse-geocoding.md): Implementing HERE reverse geocoding for telematics and fleet platforms — multi-reverse geocoding, drive-direction snapping, and the GPS ping problem that quietly destroys budgets.
- [HERE Batch Geocoding — Implementation Guide](https://docs.placematic.com/guides/batch-geocoding.md): Implementing the HERE Batch API v7 job lifecycle — create, start, poll, retrieve, delete — plus concurrency limits, the 204 that is not an error, and why batch is the first thing you should migrate.
- [HERE Points of Interest — Implementation Guide](https://docs.placematic.com/guides/points-of-interest.md): Working with HERE POI data — discover, browse, and lookup endpoints, truck-relevant POIs, and an honest assessment of where Google's place data is simply better.
- [HERE Fuel Prices API — Implementation Guide](https://docs.placematic.com/guides/fuel-prices.md): How to implement HERE Fuel Prices v3 in production — search geometries, fuel type IDs, the US cash-vs-credit trap, and truck accessibility filtering.
- [HERE Maps and Map Rendering — Implementation Guide](https://docs.placematic.com/guides/maps.md): Implementing HERE map tiles in production — vector versus raster, web versus mobile SDK entitlements, session versus request billing, and the licensing question that surfaces at app store submission.
- [HERE SDK for iOS and Android — Implementation Guide](https://docs.placematic.com/guides/here-sdk.md): Implementing the HERE mobile SDK — editions and entitlements, offline maps, on-device turn-by-turn, binary size, and the licensing question that surfaces at app store submission.
- [HERE Positioning — Implementation Guide](https://docs.placematic.com/guides/positioning.md): Hybrid positioning with HERE — Wi-Fi, cellular, and GNSS fusion, when GPS is not enough, and why most fleet platforms should not use this API at all.
- [HERE Catchment Area and Isolines — Implementation Guide](https://docs.placematic.com/guides/catchment-area.md): Computing travel-time service areas with HERE — isolines versus radius buffers, range types, when a polygon lies to you, and the site-selection workflow that depends on it.
- [Migrating from Google Maps Platform to HERE](https://docs.placematic.com/guides/google-migration.md): A sequenced migration guide — what to move first, what to keep on Google, how to validate quality during cutover, and how to model whether migration is worth it at all.
- [Building a Fleet Routing Platform](https://docs.placematic.com/use-cases/fleet-routing.md): Architecture for fleet routing systems on HERE — separating dispatch planning from device guidance, where the constraint set lives, and the cost structure that decides whether you survive scale.
- [Architecture for Logistics Platforms and TMS](https://docs.placematic.com/use-cases/logistics-platform.md): Building a TMS on HERE — the multi-tenant constraint problem, planning versus execution tiers, freight-specific data flows, and where a routing API stops being enough.
- [Calculating Delivery Zones and Service Areas](https://docs.placematic.com/use-cases/delivery-zones.md): Building drive-time delivery zones — why radius buffers produce confidently wrong decisions, materializing isolines into PostGIS, and the containment query that should never hit an API.
- [Architecture for Restaurant Delivery Platforms](https://docs.placematic.com/use-cases/restaurant-delivery.md): Building restaurant delivery on HERE — the serviceability check that must never call an API, courier assignment, dynamic delivery pricing, and where Google is the better choice.
- [Field Service Optimization](https://docs.placematic.com/use-cases/field-service.md): Building field service scheduling on HERE — skills-constrained tour planning, appointment windows, the daily solve cadence, and why re-optimizing on every event destroys technician trust.
- [Building a Modern Store Locator](https://docs.placematic.com/use-cases/store-locator.md): Store locator architecture on HERE — why /browse and /discover rank differently, the query that should never hit an API, and the build-versus-buy line most teams cross too late.
- [Building Sales and Operational Territories](https://docs.placematic.com/use-cases/territory-management.md): Territory design on HERE — drive-time versus administrative boundaries, the balancing problem nobody warns you about, and why territory systems are 80% database and 20% API.
- [Building EV Charging Applications](https://docs.placematic.com/use-cases/ev-charging.md): EV charging architecture on HERE — routing versus charge points, why availability and network data have different freshness, and the commercial truck charging problem nobody has solved.
- [Retail Expansion and Site Selection](https://docs.placematic.com/use-cases/site-selection.md): Site selection architecture — drive-time trade areas, cannibalization modelling, the demographic join, and why the mapping API is the least interesting part of this system.
- [Location Intelligence for Business Analytics](https://docs.placematic.com/use-cases/location-intelligence.md): Building a location intelligence capability — the spatial join that dominates the workload, why the mapping API is a small line item, and when you do not need one at all.
- [Reducing Google Maps API Costs](https://docs.placematic.com/use-cases/reducing-google-maps-costs.md): What actually drives a Google Maps bill, which fixes work without changing vendors, and how to model whether migration is worth the engineering.
- [Embedding a Routing API in Your SaaS Product](https://docs.placematic.com/use-cases/embedding-routing-api.md): Building location features into a multi-tenant B2B product — tenant isolation, quota allocation, the rate limit you share, and the reselling question you must answer before you ship.
- [Calculating Accurate ETAs](https://docs.placematic.com/use-cases/eta-calculation.md): Why your ETA is wrong — routing duration is not a delivery promise, traffic is a departure-time parameter, and the dwell time no API knows about.
- [Building an ELD Platform](https://docs.placematic.com/use-cases/eld-platform.md): Location architecture for electronic logging devices — HOS coupling, IFTA jurisdiction miles, defensible route reconstruction, and the audit artifact you must be able to produce.
- [Real-Time Vehicle Tracking Architecture](https://docs.placematic.com/use-cases/vehicle-tracking.md): Ingesting GPS at scale — why nothing expensive should touch a packet on arrival, stop detection as the unit of work, and the ratio that tells you whether your bill is broken.
- [Geofencing at Scale](https://docs.placematic.com/use-cases/geofencing.md): Geofence entry and exit detection across thousands of zones and vehicles — a spatial index problem, not an API problem, and the two cases where that stops being true.
- [Last-Mile Delivery Optimization](https://docs.placematic.com/use-cases/last-mile-delivery.md): Dense urban delivery — the walking segment routing ignores, failed attempts as a first-class outcome, and why the optimizer's plan and the driver's day diverge.
- [Fleet Electrification Feasibility](https://docs.placematic.com/use-cases/fleet-electrification.md): Answering whether your existing routes can be run by EVs — the analysis you do before buying trucks, and why most of it needs no routing API at all.
- [Hazmat and Restricted Cargo Routing](https://docs.placematic.com/use-cases/hazmat-routing.md): Routing hazardous materials — class-based restrictions, tunnel categories, and why a route that returns 200 can still be a federal violation.
- [Address Validation and Data Quality](https://docs.placematic.com/use-cases/address-validation.md): Why some of your addresses are wrong, how confidence scores prevent silent corruption, and the normalization step that does more than any API.
- [Architecture](https://docs.placematic.com/architecture/index.md): Design decisions that determine whether a location platform survives scale — and why the API call is almost never the thing that matters.
- [Routing vs Matrix: Choosing the Right Primitive](https://docs.placematic.com/architecture/choosing-routing-vs-matrix.md): Why engineers reach for point-to-point routing when they need a matrix, what it costs asymptotically, and the decision tree that prevents it.
- [Caching Geocoding Results](https://docs.placematic.com/architecture/caching-geocoding-results.md): Addresses do not move. Normalization as a cache-hit multiplier, what invalidation actually means here, and the privacy obligation a permanent geocode cache creates.
- [High-Volume Geocoding Architecture](https://docs.placematic.com/architecture/high-volume-geocoding.md): Four million addresses, one pipeline — job lifecycle versus stream, idempotency, the status codes that are not errors, and what to monitor when nothing is watching.
- [Routing System Architecture](https://docs.placematic.com/architecture/routing-system-architecture.md): Designing a production routing platform — the tiers that must not collapse into each other, where the queue belongs, what failover actually means, and how a constraint gets lost.
- [Google Migration Architecture](https://docs.placematic.com/architecture/google-migration-architecture.md): Dual-running, shadow comparison, and rollback — the mechanics of moving a production location system without a Sunday-night cutover.
- [Multi-Tenant Location Platform](https://docs.placematic.com/architecture/multi-tenant-location-platform.md): Isolation failure modes, quota allocation under a shared contract, the cache key that leaks, and why your billing unit must correlate with your cost unit.
- [Cost Optimization Patterns](https://docs.placematic.com/architecture/cost-optimization-patterns.md): Seven patterns, ranked by the order of magnitude they move. The arithmetic, the failure modes, and why the last three matter more than the first four.
- [Examples](https://docs.placematic.com/examples/index.md): Copy-paste examples for HERE Location Services. Production quality, verified endpoints, no toy code.
- [Geocode an Address](https://docs.placematic.com/examples/geocode-address.md): Convert an address to coordinates with HERE Geocoding & Search v7 — including confidence scoring, the routing access point, and structured queries.
- [Batch Address Cleanup — One Million Records](https://docs.placematic.com/examples/batch-address-cleanup.md): A complete pipeline: normalize, deduplicate, chunk, queue, submit, poll, handle partial failure, cache, export. And the step that removes 80% of the bill before any API call.
- [Calculate a Car Route](https://docs.placematic.com/examples/car-route.md): Passenger vehicle routing with HERE Routing v8 — departure time, explicit return fields, and the 200 response that means no route was found.
- [Calculate a Truck Route](https://docs.placematic.com/examples/truck-route.md): Commercial vehicle routing with HERE Routing v8 — physical constraints, the units that will catch you, and CI assertions against real trap geometry.
- [Distance Matrix](https://docs.placematic.com/examples/distance-matrix.md): Matrix Routing v8 — the async job lifecycle, mode-specific size ceilings, and the flat array that transposes silently.
- [Calculate an Isochrone](https://docs.placematic.com/examples/calculate-isochrone.md): Drive-time and consumption isolines with HERE Isoline Routing v8 — flexible polyline decoding, multiple range bands in one call, and materializing the result.
- [Route Matching](https://docs.placematic.com/examples/route-matching.md): Map-matching a GPS trace to road segments with HERE Route Matching v8 — confidence values, warnings, and the MapVersion field that makes an audit artifact possible.
- [Traffic Flow](https://docs.placematic.com/examples/traffic-flow.md): Real-time traffic flow and incidents with HERE Traffic API v7 — geospatial filters, jam factor, and why polling a bounding box is not a live map.
- [Tour Planning](https://docs.placematic.com/examples/tour-planning.md): Solving a Vehicle Routing Problem with HERE Tour Planning v3 — the async lifecycle, the profile reference that trips everyone, and unassigned jobs as a first-class outcome.
- [Batch Geocoding](https://docs.placematic.com/examples/batch-geocoding.md): Four million addresses through HERE Batch API v7 — the job lifecycle, serviceHrn, idempotency across worker restarts, and the status codes that are not errors.
- [Calculate an EV Route](https://docs.placematic.com/examples/ev-route.md): Electric vehicle routing with HERE Routing v8 — consumption curves, charge state, and charging stops returned as postActions.
- [Reverse Geocode](https://docs.placematic.com/examples/reverse-geocode.md): Coordinates to addresses with HERE Geocoding & Search v7 — single and multi-point, coordinate rounding, and the telematics pattern that decides your bill.
- [Autocomplete an Address](https://docs.placematic.com/examples/autocomplete-address.md): Type-ahead address entry with HERE Geocoding & Search v7 — debouncing, request cancellation, and why /autocomplete is not /autosuggest.
- [Search Nearby POIs](https://docs.placematic.com/examples/search-poi.md): Finding places with HERE Geocoding & Search v7 — /discover ranks by relevance, /browse ranks by distance, and that difference is the most common integration bug.
- [Render a HERE Map](https://docs.placematic.com/examples/render-map.md): HERE Raster Tile API v3 with Leaflet and MapLibre GL — tile URLs, truck restriction layers, CDN caching, and domain-restricting a browser-exposed key.
- [Nearest Store Search](https://docs.placematic.com/examples/nearest-store-search.md): An end-to-end recipe: PostGIS shortlist, one matrix call to rank by drive time, and why straight-line distance is a bad ranker and an excellent filter.
- [Store Locator — End to End](https://docs.placematic.com/examples/store-locator.md): A complete store locator: autocomplete, geocode, PostGIS shortlist, matrix rank, map render, directions. Four HERE APIs, three of them called once per session.
- [Fleet Dashboard — End to End](https://docs.placematic.com/examples/fleet-dashboard.md): Ingest 648,000 GPS packets a day and call HERE roughly 2,400 times. Stop detection, lazy reverse geocoding, truck routing, and ETA refresh without re-routing.
- [Migrating One Endpoint from Google Maps](https://docs.placematic.com/examples/google-migration.md): A real geocoding migration, request by request. The provider facade, the semantic differences that return 200, and shadow comparison against ground truth.
- [Comparisons](https://docs.placematic.com/comparisons/index.md): Technical decision guides for teams evaluating HERE against Google Maps, Mapbox, TomTom, Azure Maps and self-hosted OSM stacks.
- [HERE Routing vs Google Maps Routing](https://docs.placematic.com/comparisons/here-routing-vs-google-maps.md): Google Large Vehicle Routing versus HERE truck routing — constraint expressiveness, per-axle-group weight, toll cost, coverage limits, and an honest account of where Google Routes is the better engine.
- [HERE vs OpenStreetMap](https://docs.placematic.com/comparisons/here-vs-openstreetmap.md): Not a product comparison. A managed platform versus a stack of open-source components you assemble, host, monitor and keep current.
- [HERE Geocoding vs Google Maps Geocoding](https://docs.placematic.com/comparisons/here-geocoding-vs-google-maps.md): Address precision, per-field confidence scoring, batch architecture, and why 'more accurate' cannot be answered without your own address dataset.
- [HERE vs Google Maps](https://docs.placematic.com/comparisons/here-vs-google-maps.md): Platform-level fit. Consumer applications versus B2B operational systems, and why the answer is usually both.
- [HERE vs Mapbox](https://docs.placematic.com/comparisons/here-vs-mapbox.md): Rendering and styling versus commercial vehicle routing. This is usually a hybrid, not a choice — and forcing an all-or-nothing migration is the mistake.
- [HERE vs Azure Maps](https://docs.placematic.com/comparisons/here-vs-azure-maps.md): A procurement and enterprise-architecture decision more than an API decision — and a note on where Azure Maps data comes from.
- [HERE vs TomTom](https://docs.placematic.com/comparisons/here-vs-tomtom.md): Two credible commercial platforms with genuinely overlapping truck routing. Where the difference is real, where it is marketing, and the one gap that decides it for US carriers.
- [FAQ](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/index.md): Direct answers to the questions engineers actually ask before choosing HERE Location Services — including the ones where the answer is 'it depends on your contract.'
- [What is HERE Location Services?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/what-is-here-location-services.md): A platform of roughly two dozen APIs — routing, geocoding, maps, positioning, fleet optimization — priced separately and with different maturity levels.
- [How do I get a HERE API key?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/how-do-i-get-a-here-api-key.md): Two paths: self-serve on HERE's portal, or partner-issued with entitlements confirmed for your use case. The difference matters more than the speed.
- [Do I buy from HERE or Placematic?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/do-i-buy-from-here-or-placematic.md): Direct contract or Gold Partner. When each makes sense, what a partner contract actually changes, and when you should go direct.
- [How much does HERE cost?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/how-much-does-here-cost.md): Nobody can answer this without knowing your call mix. Here's what determines it, and how to produce a number you can defend.
- [What drives my API bill?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/what-drives-my-api-bill.md): Not the rate card. The unit of work you attached the API call to.
- [How can I reduce location API costs?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/how-can-i-reduce-location-api-costs.md): Seven patterns, ranked by the order of magnitude they move. Most teams start at number seven.
- [Is HERE cheaper than Google Maps?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/is-here-cheaper-than-google.md): Sometimes. Rarely for the reason you think, and never in a way a single percentage captures.
- [How does HERE billing work?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/how-does-billing-work.md): Per-transaction, per-API, with two commercial models. Free bundles don't pool, and choosing the wrong model punishes operational diligence.
- [Which HERE API should I use?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/which-here-api-should-i-use.md): Choose by the question your system asks, not by product name. Routing, Matrix, and Tour Planning look interchangeable and are not.
- [Should I use Routing or Matrix?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/should-i-use-routing-or-matrix.md): If you're writing a loop, you already know. One rule catches almost every error.
- [When should I cache results?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/when-should-i-cache-results.md): Almost always. Buildings are stationary. But cache the right thing, keyed the right way, invalidated on events rather than clocks.
- [Can I store geocoding results?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/can-i-store-geocoding-results.md): A contract question with architectural consequences. Get the answer in writing before you design a permanent cache.
- [How do I handle rate limits?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/how-do-i-handle-rate-limits.md): 429 backs off. 403 never succeeds. Treating them the same generates support tickets and outages.
- [How do I test before production?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/how-do-i-test-before-production.md): Trap geometry, in CI, with a control. And verify every entitlement with one curl before sprint planning.
- [How hard is it to migrate from Google Maps?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/how-hard-is-it-to-migrate-from-google.md): Varies enormously by surface. Batch geocoding is a sprint. Rendering is a rewrite. Migrate one at a time.
- [Do I have to change my data model?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/do-i-have-to-change-my-data-model.md): Yes, in one specific way — and it's the way migrations fail. Design your abstraction from the richer capability set.
- [Can I run Google and HERE in parallel?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/can-i-run-google-and-here-in-parallel.md): You should, during migration. And you may want to stay that way permanently.
- [How do I validate the migration?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/how-do-i-validate-the-migration.md): Against ground truth, not against each other. Report distributions, not means. And for truck routing, the comparison is a gate, not a metric.
- [Does HERE support truck routing?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/does-here-support-truck-routing.md): Yes — and setting transportMode=truck is not how you use it. Omit the dimensions and HERE routes an unconstrained vehicle without warning.
- [How does HERE handle hazmat routing?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/how-does-here-handle-hazmat.md): Two separate parameters governing different things. Confusing them is the most common — and most consequential — hazmat integration error.
- [How accurate are HERE ETAs?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/how-accurate-are-etas.md): The routing duration is usually fine. Your ETA is wrong because it omits everything the routing engine cannot know.
- [Can I build an ELD platform on HERE?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/can-i-build-an-eld-platform.md): Yes. And reverse geocoding will not survive the audit — only Route Matching returns the road segments a regulator will ask about.
- [What support does Placematic provide?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/what-support-does-placematic-provide.md): Contracting, entitlements, and implementation guidance. Not a support tier, and not a substitute for HERE's own escalation path on map data.
- [When should I contact Placematic?](https://docs.placematic.com/faq/when-should-i-contact-placematic.md): Before you scope the sprint, not after. And several cases where you shouldn't bother.
- [Placematic MCP Server](https://docs.placematic.com/mcp/overview.md): A Model Context Protocol endpoint that exposes the Placematic Spatial API to AI agents as callable tools.
- [Quickstart](https://docs.placematic.com/mcp/quickstart.md): Connect an agent to the Placematic MCP Server and make your first tool call.
- [Authentication](https://docs.placematic.com/mcp/authentication.md): How the Placematic MCP Server authenticates a caller, and how to handle the token.
- [Tool reference](https://docs.placematic.com/mcp/tools.md): Arguments, response shapes and error behaviour for every tool the Placematic MCP Server exposes.
- [Troubleshooting](https://docs.placematic.com/mcp/troubleshooting.md): Failure modes on the Placematic MCP Server, what each one looks like, and what actually causes it.