PlacesAPI: A UK-only Places alternative, built on Algolia, for super easy migration

[placesapi]

PlacesAPI

We have many clients using Algolia Places in production and we are genuinely sad to see it go. It’s an amazing service that set the bar extremely high and the seamless integration with InstantSearch was a perfect fit for us because we use that a lot too.

We were facing considerable engineering effort to replace Algolia Places so we decided to make our own. Our clients with Algolia InstantSearch implementations were quickly migrated, in some cases in a few minutes, which removed the migration pressure completely and for our use cases the user experience is identical.

We realised this might be useful to others so we've decided to open it up as a service:

www.placesapi.co.uk

We focus on UK and Republic of Ireland data down to partial postcode level, not full street-level addresses at this time. This is for logistical reasons because 30m+ addresses requires some careful thought, both in terms of engineering and cost. However, we are Royal Mail development partners and are actively looking at this as an option.

You can use any of Algolia’s tools and client libraries with our service, including their REST API. We have a REST API of our own too that is based on the Algolia Places REST API but with a few minor differences, again this was initially to help our clients who had location search built into their back-end processes but now anyone can use it.

If you have any questions you can email [email protected].

[JonathanMontane]

@placesapi Thank you for building this!