Announcing Elevation Data

Ever since we started offering our navigation API, we've received a slow, steady stream of requests for elevation data. While we really wanted to offer this, doing so, at the quality of service our customers deserve, requires a lot of disk space. Given our global user base and commitment to affordable prices, we needed to find a solution that allowed us to offer world-wide elevation coverage without costing too much. Thanks to our cloud provider's new Object Storage offering, we developed a performant solution that enables us to deliver global elevation data without raising prices. We finished beta testing a few weeks ago, and are excited to announce that Valhalla-powered elevation APIs are now live!

Elevation data—at a point or along a path

Elevation data is a perfect companion to route planning, especially for runners and cyclists. In addition to getting the elevation at a single point, you can also ask for the elevation along a path (such as a cycling route) and use this data to display a route profile for a planned route.

Elevation-influenced Routing for Bicycles

Additionally, bicycle routing can now specify a hill usage penalty. This gives most cyclists outside Switzerland the option to flatten out the ride a bit. For those of you in the Swiss alps, we can’t promise too much. ⛰:flag-ch:

Introducing api.stadiamaps.com

We're also excited to announce a new hostname that you can use for accessing all of our APIs. route.stadiamaps.com served its purpose well when we only offered routing APIs, but as we grow, we feel it’s time to make the transition to a more general hostname for all of our geospatial APIs: api.stadiamaps.com. We will, of course, continue supporting existing services running on the old subdomain, but the forthcoming geospatial APIs will only be accessible via api.stadiamaps.com.

Get Stated with Elevation Data

Want to dive right into using elevation data? Learn more over in our documentation!

Talk to us!

Is our routing service missing something? Wish you could do something more with Stadia Maps? We’re always happy to hear how we can improve! Let us know via email or the social links below.