Amazon Location Service vs HERE Location Services

Amazon Location Service

Places, Routes and Maps calls work over plain HTTPS with an API key limited to named actions, and every one of the 17 operations is read-only with typed inputs. Access starts with an AWS account a person opens, the key travels in the URL query string, and stored results cost eight times the single-use rate.

HERE Location Services

Each endpoint page carries an OpenAPI 3.0 definition as Markdown, and HERE publishes 99.9 per cent monthly availability targets and a six-month deprecation policy. The Platform Terms of September 2023 forbid using HERE Materials in connection with a machine learning or AI system, and the price table could not be read.

Amazon Location Service

1. Call the v2 endpoints (places.geo.<region>.amazonaws.com/v2/geocode, routes.geo, maps.geo). They need no resource creation, unlike the v1 place index and route calculator calls
2. Set IntendedUse to Storage before saving or caching any Places result. The default SingleUse results may not be stored under section 82.4 of the AWS Service Terms
3. Read PricingBucket in each response. Requesting Contact, Access, TimeZone or Phonemes in AdditionalFeatures moves a Places call from $0.50 to $1.50 per 1,000
4. Keep the API key out of logs and shared URLs, since it travels as ?key=. Use SigV4 with an IAM role for server-side work, and for the Jobs API, which refuses API keys
5. Back off on HTTP 429 ThrottlingException. The burst allowance is 80 per cent of the per-second rate within any part of a second

HERE Location Services

1. Send Authorization: Bearer with an OAuth token where logs are kept. The apiKey query parameter puts the secret in every URL
2. Do not store results for more than 30 days, and follow the HTTP caching headers on each response
3. Treat 429 and 503 as throttling. HERE says a traffic surge can be throttled for about 10 minutes below the account's quota
4. Read code, cause and action in the error body, and quote correlationId to support
5. For Location Reasoning, send initialize, keep the Mcp-Session-Id header on later calls, and send a bearer token on tools/call