# Amazon Location Service vs MapTiler Cloud (slim)

> Amazon Location Service scores 76.5 (BB) to MapTiler Cloud's 62.1 (B) for geocoding. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

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- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-07
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Amazon Location Service scores 76.5 (BB) on agent readiness against MapTiler Cloud's 62.1 (B), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. MapTiler Cloud leads on payments & pricing and maintenance & community. Both do geocoding.

- Amazon Location Service: BB 76.5, rank #43 of 1510 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/amazon-location.min.md
- MapTiler Cloud: B 62.1, rank #576 of 1510 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/maptiler.min.md
- Amazon Location Service, good for Operators already on AWS who want geocoding, places and routing inside IAM, CloudTrail and one bill, with HERE data and GrabMaps for Southeast Asia. Ahead on Reliability, 95 against 43; Schema & documentation, 87 against 79; Agent ergonomics, 88 against 70; Security & auth, 76 against 64. Also Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better; A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install.
- MapTiler Cloud, good for Map tiles, static maps and worldwide geocoding with storable results for apps that also show a map, with EU data residency. Ahead on Payments & pricing, 40 against 30; Maintenance & community, 70 against 60.

| Category | Amazon Location Service | MapTiler Cloud |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 95 | 43 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 87 | 79 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 88 | 70 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 76 | 64 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 30 | 40 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 60 | 70 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 77 | 80 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Amazon Location Service | MapTiler Cloud |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Amazon Web Services | MapTiler AG |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://places.geo.us-east-1.amazonaws.com` | no (local only) |
| Pricing | Pay per use | Freemium |
| Price for geocoding | $0.50 per 1,000 requests | not published |
| Licence | Proprietary service under the AWS Customer Agreement and AWS Service Terms. The AWS SDK clients and the agent context package on GitHub are Apache-2.0 | none |
| Read-only variant documented | yes | no |
| Last release | 2026-08-17 | 2026-10-02 |
| Terms last updated | 2026-10-01 | no date given |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-05-18 | no date given |
| Customer content may train models | yes, with an opt-out | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict automated access | yes | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | yes | not found in the text |
| Terms or service can change without notice | yes | not found in the text |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text | yes |
| Popularity | 427k npm/wk | 115k npm/wk |
| Agent reviews | 4/5 (4) | none |

Why the edge:
- Reliability, Amazon Location Service +52: Amazon Location Service 95 (Hosted reading. AWS Health Dashboard with a feed per service and region (20). The Amazon Location feeds for us-east-1 and eu-west-1 held no events on 1 November 2026 (last built 31 October), and the dashboard's event history, re-read on 1 November, names Amazon Location in no event. Its oldest event is the us-east-1 one of 28 October 2025, the open Middle East events of March 2026 don't list it, and the newest update is the API Gateway us-west-2 event of 30 October 2026. The public dashboard lists only broad events, so a clean feed says less than a small vendor's detailed page (30). Default rates published per operation, re-read on 1 November, 100 a second for each Places call, 20 for `CalculateRoutes`, isolines and `SnapToRoads`, 5 for `CalculateRouteMatrix` and `OptimizeWaypoints`, with a burst of 80 per cent (the burst rule per the 8 October check) (15). Throttling returns `ThrottlingException` with HTTP 429, marked retryable in the service model, and every v2 call is a read, but the guide gives no backoff or `Retry-After` guidance (10 of 15). Amazon Location SLA at 99.9 per cent monthly uptime per region (last updated 5 May 2022, re-read on 1 November) (10). GA (10). 20 + 30 + 15 + 10 + 10 + 10 = 95.); MapTiler Cloud 43 (Hosted lines. status.maptiler.com is a StatusCake public uptime report rather than a component incident page (15). Its data loads from app.statuscake.com, whose robots.txt answered with a redirect, so we didn't fetch it and read no history. That's our limit, not a finding, and the rubric gives 5 (5). Monthly request and session quotas are published per plan, but no per-second limit (5). No 429, Retry-After or backoff guidance found in the API reference, the OpenAPI spec or llms-full.txt (0). The pricing page lists a 99.9% SLA on the Custom plan, while the Cloud terms call availability best effort and point to a custom SLA (8). The public APIs are GA (10). 15+5+5+0+8+10 = 43.)
- Agent ergonomics, Amazon Location Service +18: Amazon Location Service 88 (API reading of the checklist. Places responses stay at the core fields unless `AdditionalFeatures` asks for more, and `MaxResults` caps the count, but there is no field selection and route responses can reach the 6 MB limit (20 of 25). `MaxResults` on six of seven Places calls, `NextToken` on `SearchText` and `SearchNearby`, and filters by country, bounding box and place type (18 of 20). Four typed errors per API, with a reason and field list on `ValidationException` (17 of 20). Every v2 operation is marked read-only in the model, so retries are safe. No hints apply to a plain API (18 of 20). One required field or none on most calls, an API key that avoids SigV4 signing, and SDKs on npm and PyPI among others (15).); MapTiler Cloud 70 (API reading. limit, types, bbox, proximity, country, language and fuzzyMatch size geocoding results, and the batch endpoint takes up to 50 queries (20). Country, bbox and type filters, no pagination (geocoding rarely needs it) (16). Errors are documented as 400 and 403 with no recovery guidance (10). Every public API reads and is safe to retry (12). Few required parameters, but official clients are JavaScript and TypeScript only, plus native mobile SDKs (12). 20+16+10+12+12 = 70.)
- Security & auth, Amazon Location Service +12: Amazon Location Service 76 (Three credential routes, SigV4 with IAM, Amazon Cognito, and API keys limited to named actions and resources with optional expiry and referrer or app restrictions, which earns 30 (the API key page re-read on 1 November). Less 10 because the API key is sent in the `key` query parameter, the only documented way to present it (20). API keys reach only read calls on Maps, Places and Routes, and IAM policies scope each action and resource (18 of 20). Results carry place names and third-party map data, and no prompt-injection guidance was found in the reviewed documentation (5 of 15). CloudTrail records management events by default and data events on request, and CloudWatch reports usage by `ApiKeyName` (15). A vulnerability disclosure programme on HackerOne with a policy at vdp.aws.security, public security bulletins (none from 17 October to 1 November names Amazon Location), audit reports in AWS Artifact, Amazon Location Service in SOC 1, 2 and 3 scope on the list updated 11 August 2026 (per the 17 October check), and a FedRAMP High announcement of 28 October 2024. The aws.amazon.com security.txt, re-read on 1 November, expires on 16 October 2027. No paid bug bounty was found, so 2 points stay held back, as on the S3, SES, Polly and Secrets Manager re-checks of 17 October and the S3 re-check of 1 November (18 of 20). 20 + 18 + 5 + 15 + 18 = 76.); MapTiler Cloud 64 (Revocable keys that can be limited to origins and a User-Agent substring and managed by the API keys API, and service tokens that sign requests so the token itself never travels, which earns 27. Less 10 because the key is 'always passed as a query parameter' (17). The public APIs are read-only, and account changes need a separate service token (16). Geocoding returns OpenStreetMap names and addresses, community-edited text, with no prompt-injection guidance (7). An Analytics API and account usage statistics (8). security.txt, a vulnerability disclosure policy and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification per the security page. No bug bounty found (16). 17+16+7+8+16 = 64.)
- Payments & pricing, MapTiler Cloud +10: Amazon Location Service 30 (No x402, MPP or L402 (0). Per-1,000 prices for every operation and bucket published without a login, in the price feed the pricing page loads (still the 11 September 2026 publication on 1 November) (20). The pricing page lists monthly allowances for the first three months (20,000 core Places calls, 10,000 routes, 500,000 tiles), and Free Tier FAQ Q4, re-read on 1 November, says a payment method isn't required to sign up for most new customers but may be requested to verify identity. Half the line, as amazon-s3, amazon-polly and aws-secrets-manager got for the same FAQ (10). A person signs up in a browser. `CreateKey` mints API keys by API only after an account exists (0). 0 + 20 + 10 + 0 = 30.); MapTiler Cloud 40 (No x402, MPP or L402 (0). Per-1,000 prices for requests ($0.15) and sessions ($2.50) public without login (20). Free plan with no card, though only for testing and non-commercial use (20). Signup is a browser flow (0). 0+20+20+0 = 40.)
- Maintenance & community, MapTiler Cloud +10: Amazon Location Service 60 (Read as a closed service, by the listing's own service models, as the S3 re-check of 1 November read models/s3. The newest API change is still the `geo-maps` model on 17 August 2026 (point-of-interest density and category filters on maps), 76 days before the check. The models repository had commits to 30 October, none touching the `geo-places`, `geo-routes`, `geo-maps` or `location` models (20 of 30). In the last 90 days we found that one model change plus two releases of the agent context package, v1.1.0 on 6 August and v1.2.0 on 11 September 2026, with no later tag. The two package releases are agent guidance for the service, not changes to it, so half, as manifold-mcp's skills releases were read (10 of 20). AWS What's New posts for the service run to 2 April 2026 (none in the feed's 100 items from 20 to 30 October), re:Post and paid support exist, and the agent context repository had no open issues on 8 October (10 of 15). Official SDKs are current, the aws-sdk-js-v3 release v3.1161.0 and boto3 1.43.123, both tagged 30 October 2026 (15). SDKs regenerate from the model on AWS's release train, CI not checked (5 of 10). 20 + 10 + 10 + 15 + 5 = 60.); MapTiler Cloud 70 (@maptiler/client 3.1.0 and @maptiler/sdk 4.2.0 on 2 October 2026, 35 days before this check, with the agent skill updated on 21 October (20). Platform updates entries for August (EU endpoint, key security) and September 2026 (terrain blending) plus the two October releases (20). A Discord community and support answered on a best-effort basis within two business days, per the Cloud terms. We didn't read GitHub issues (10). Official JavaScript client and SDK current, no Python client (12). The SDK repository runs unit and end-to-end tests in CI; we didn't check results (8). 20+20+10+12+8 = 70.)
- Schema & documentation, Amazon Location Service +8: Amazon Location Service 87 (The Smithy service models for `geo-places`, `geo-routes`, `geo-maps` and `location` (API version 2020-11-19) are public in aws/api-models-aws and in every AWS SDK, a machine-readable contract in the role OpenAPI plays (25). llms.txt for the developer guide, a Markdown twin of each page and the whole guide as `full.md` (10). A choose-an-API page and per-operation pages with use cases say when each call fits, with less on when not to use one (15 of 20). Inputs carry enums and ranges, such as `MaxResults` 1 to 100 and `QueryText` up to 200 characters (15). How-to pages give sample requests, responses, cURL and CLI commands, and each action lists its errors with HTTP codes, but the `ValidationException` fields are documented as "Test stub" (12 of 15). Versioned paths (`/v2/`), yet the document history, re-read on 1 November, still has one entry, dated 31 October 2024, and changes are announced only in AWS What's New posts (10 of 15).); MapTiler Cloud 79 (OpenAPI 3.1.0 document with 32 paths for the public APIs (25). llms.txt, llms-full.txt and a Markdown twin of every page (10). Each API page says what it's for and when to use the SDK instead (session billing), with little on when not to call it (13). Parameters are typed with defaults, such as limit (default 5 forward, 1 reverse) and a types enum, but bbox and proximity are strings (11). Examples on every endpoint, and the spec documents 400, 403, 404 and 414, without an error reference page (10). A dated platform updates page and a geocoding index changelog, but no version in the API path and the spec is version '1.0' (10). 25+10+13+11+10+10 = 79.)