SaaS platforms and marketplaces
Geography is one screen in your product and a year of somebody's time
If your customers manage territories, service areas or partner coverage, you will end up building this. The question is whether it is worth the year, because the part that looks simple is the part you finish in a week.
What the build actually costs
- Point-in-polygon is the easy part
- A weekend gets you an answer for one boundary. What takes the year is overlapping areas, a priority rule somebody can change, boundaries that were different last quarter, and a geocoder that sometimes returns a city centroid and has to say so.
- Every customer wants a different map
- ZIP code lists, drawn shapes, radii, drive time, and then one customer with all four. Territory shapes are where a general platform quietly becomes a bespoke one.
- Wrong answers arrive as support tickets
- When a customer says the routing is broken, somebody on your team has to reconstruct what the system decided and why. Without the reasoning stored, that is an afternoon per ticket.
One call, and an answer you can render
Send an address or a pair of coordinates and get back the territory, the owner, the rule that decided it and how precisely the address was located. That last part matters when you are putting the answer in somebody else's product: a result your interface can show as uncertain is better than one it has to present as fact.
The API is documented in the docs, and the resolver is the same one the application screens use, so there is no second implementation to drift from the first.
Your customers, kept apart
Every territory, every version and every decision belongs to an organization, and requests carry which one they are for. Nothing crosses that line, which is what makes it safe to put several of your customers behind one integration rather than running a copy per customer.
Versions matter more here than anywhere else on this site. When a customer's map changes, your support team needs to know what the map was when the disputed request came in, and that is a stored version rather than a reconstruction.
What it does not do
It is not a white-label front end. There is an application, and it is ours; what you embed is the API and the answers, and the interface your customers see stays yours to design.
It does not bill your customers or model your plans. Usage is reported per organization so you can price on it however you like, and how you charge is a decision this has no view on.