The first week: 1,600 sign-ups, one outage, and what it all costs

On Wednesday morning I expected the beta to be a quiet thing. A hundred people, maybe, mostly friends of friends. By nine o'clock on Thursday there were 105 sign-ups. By that night there were over 300. As I write this on Sunday there are 1,600 sign-ups, some from people who asked for both platforms. I posted about this once, on one Facebook page, and every morning since there have been more of you than the day before. Well over eight hundred of you are on TestFlight and more than five hundred are on the Android test.

Thank you. And, honestly, a little bit of help.

What happened on Thursday

Thursday afternoon, search stopped working for several hours. The map kept drawing, so nothing looked broken; the app simply could not find anything you typed.

Here is why. Every search, route and address lookup goes to TomTom, the map company we build on. Their free tier allows a fixed number of those requests a day. On a normal day for a small beta that number is generous. On a day when several hundred people open the app for the first time and all type "Tim Hortons" within the same hour, it is gone by lunch.

We are on a paid plan now. We also cache the common searches on our own server, so when the hundredth person searches for the same thing in the same neighbourhood, TomTom is not asked again. Between the two, it will not fail that way twice. Sorry to everyone who hit it.

What it costs

Because people have asked, and because I would rather say it plainly than have you wonder: the map is not free to run, and the bill scales with you.

There are two kinds of request. Map tiles, which draw the streets, are cheap and cached well. Everything else is metered: each search, each route, each speed-limit lookup, each live charger count. In the first week the metered calls split almost evenly four ways, and two of those four were things the app did in the background that nobody had asked for. It was checking the speed limit every 150 metres while you drove, and fetching live charger counts for every charging station in a search result, whether or not you tapped one.

Both are fixed in the next build. Speed limits now arrive with the route itself, so a drive costs one request instead of hundreds. Charger counts are fetched when you open a station's card. Together those two remove about half of the metered calls without you noticing anything missing.

The traffic overlay was the other surprise. It had been drawn for everyone, all the time, including someone just looking at the map, and traffic tiles refresh every few minutes. From the next build, traffic shows on your route and while navigating, and only while browsing if you switch it on.

None of this is a crisis. It is the difference between a hobby and something that can be kept running for a country, and the beta is exactly where I want to learn it.

What the emails taught us

Nearly every change in build 13 started as an email from one of you. The arrow that jumped. The street name hidden under the route line. The grocery store that lost to a branch across town. The turn announced too late.

Some questions come up so often that they now have a permanent answer. Why is my town's Canadian Tire on the wrong side of the road? Why is there no transit? Why does every route start from home? Why did the screen go dark on my dash mount? Those are on the new FAQ, and the last two are fixed in the build after this one.

How we will talk to you from here

The emails were getting long. Feature updates, bug fixes and news about the beta all in one message, and I know a lot of it was being skipped. From now on the email is short: a few headlines with a line each and a link. The full story lives here, in release notes for each build and posts like this one for everything else. If you prefer a feed reader, there is an RSS feed.

Keep the notes coming. Every one gets read by a person, and that person is usually me.

Mathieu