Show HN: MagicRail's City Suggest API – Fast Autocomplete for Your App

Hey HN,

We’re excited to introduce MagicRail’s City Suggest API, designed to make your location-based apps faster and more intuitive. Whether you’re building travel apps, logistics platforms, or geolocation services, our API helps users find cities instantly with autocomplete functionality.

Key features:

-Autocomplete city search with minimal latency

-Global database with accurate city data

-Simple API integration with flexible usage tiers

-Powered by high-precision geolocation data for enhanced accuracy

Our API delivers results as users type, making it perfect for any use case requiring quick city search functionality.

Check out the blog for more details and a demo:

https://blog.magicrail.io/supercharge-your-app-with-magicrai...

We’d love your feedback and thoughts on how we can improve it further!

1 comment

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KMnO4 1y ago ↗

Pricing is 0.6¢/request, which means you can easily rack up a large bill if you're not careful/clever. For example, autocomplete on key press (most common use case) for San Francisco would potentially search S, Sa, San, "San ", San F, San Fr, etc. for up to 8 cents for that one search.

This doesn't seem like something that even really needs an API. A quick google search provided me with a CSV of cities 47,000 cities including county code, population, location, etc. Trimming that down only important items I was able to get a 400kb file that I could easily embed in any app/webpage and search against instantly.

The "high-precision geolocation data for enhanced accuracy" claim is also quite dubious. Even in the blog's example, it's showing Winter Garden to 8 decimal places. Am I to believe that a) it's accurate to 1.1mm (0.04in), and that b) something as large as a city needs to be that precise? You shouldn't need more than 3 decimal places (111m accuracy), or in many cases 2 (1.11km) to describe the location of a city.