Now that Algolia Places is gone, what's the best non-google alternative for auto-complete?

Algolia Places, the API and the plugin, is being discontinued (see Algolia’s website and Zeroqode’s statement).

For my next app, I need a simple search field that would auto-complete addresses queries. I’d like to avoid using Google Maps, in part to avoid their ecosystem but mostly their pricing plan.

I get the impression that all the other geographic plugins in Bubble are aimed at displaying maps, which I don’t need at this stage, and none seem to have search field features. Is there some plugin or API I’m missing ?

As a thought experiment, would it be realistic to build such a feature directly from OpenStreetmap’s Overpass API within bubble, not going through a plugin ? Has anybody tried ?

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@emmanuel this is a main problem for Bubble developers.
I can’t find any answer in the forum… because there aren’t.
No one wants to help us. Google Maps pricing is abusive. Algolia is gone. What’s left?

What about an API from free maps providers such as OpenStreetMaps?
What about an in-house solution provided by Bubble?

You could probably set something up using the API connector plugin to use the OpenStreetMaps API

I haven’t found anyone in the forums attempting this. It’s not clear to me how to use OSM for auto-complete, most of their API integrations seem to be for map / directions. Do you know of anybody doing this in bubble ?

I don’t. My assumption is the approach entails the API call to get places and then filter the results using ‘anyfield’ contains…but not sure that ‘anyfield’ is a possible constraint value when an API call is the datasource.

I looked into for about five minutes in the past and seems like there could be a way but I didn’t care enough to spend the time to figure it out as it would probably be a bit complex, unless they do have an API call for Places.

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