A great example of some of the costs Couchsurfing faces is with the use of maps in the existing web and mobile apps. While we don’t use maps as much as you all would like, we do leverage location data across every aspect of the Couchsurfing application. Couchsurfiing previously used Google Maps to provide all location information. This past summer our cost jumped from $8,000 per month to $40,000 per month due to Google’s latest price increase. We made a decision (along with many other apps) to transition to another maps provider, Mapbox. This transition took us over 2 months to complete due to the complexity of our application. Due to our small engineering team, it consumed 99% of their time. We are happy to report that with Mapbox our spend is now less than $4,000 per month. This anecdote is good at identifying the scale at which Couchsurfing operates and the discipline we have in operating a cost effective platform. This is not a simple application you can host on your own servers, or something you can re-build and support overnight.