What real-time traffic-aware API do I need for finding an Estimated Time of Arrival?

Question

I am looking for a service that can calculate the ETA, taking into account the real traffic for the route between two addresses and the departure day and time.

This service should have global coverage, high reliability of the travel time, and low latency of the response since I need it to process a large number of requests.

It would be a plus to test the API before paying.

High reliability of the travel time means that the route duration and ETA should be close to real. We care about live traffic, not historical traffic. Traffic jams here and now are important for us and should be taken into account. Google has this feature, but it's costly, so I ask this question here.

The latency in service response should be acceptable enough to use both the API for my website and for the mobile application. It should be less than a second, up to 500 ms, ideally.

The API must consider real-time traffic for driving and walking modes. I want to use it in the courier business and food delivery. Our company has drivers and couriers who deliver goods by foot. We would calculate how it is better, faster, and less costly to deliver food to the client.

Now we have several restaurants in Europe, but we would like to use a similar structure in Asia, so we need global coverage.

The price question touches me, because Google DM is very expensive, $ 8-10 for 1000 elements, which brings too much cost. https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/distance-matrix/usage-and-billing

Answer 1

I can recommend you Distance Matrix API - https://distancematrix.ai/product

It takes into account real-time traffic conditions (traffic jams and restrictions) when calculating ETA, and it has many significant advantages:

1. The API returns up to 1000 requests and 2500 elements with just one request, and it takes less than a second to do it.
2. In terms of accuracy and global coverage, API is very close to Google Distance Matrix API.
3. Travel times are estimated for driving, walking, or bicycling for a given distance. And you have the option to predict your departure and arrival times.
4. This API has a 7-days free trial period. During these days, you have the full unlimited access to Distance Matrix API and the opportunity to test it. When the trial period expires, you can choose the most convenient tariff for your business from free to a Pro version.
5. You don't need to pay until you are sure that this API can handle your tasks, no credit card required to use a free version.

Disclaimer: I work at a company that created this API.