SimpleGeo brings Context and Places APIs into public beta – makes them “free forever”

SimpleGeo is seemingly starting to gel around a set of three products: Context, Places and Storage. From today, both Context and Places are in public beta with Storage now in private beta.

So what are these products? Well, as you may already know from our previous coverage, SimpleGeo’s goal is to make it as easy as possible for developers to integrate location into their applications. With the Context API, developers can serve meaningful data to users based on their geolocation, such as real-time weather and population density, as well as many other types of data. With the Places API, developers should get from SimpleGeo something that many people have complained about not having: a unified places database that pulls in venue data from many different services and is then run through the SimpleGeo ringer to give “the place”.

Storage of course, is pretty self-explanitory, but according to SimpleGeo’s product description, its Storage product, “allows you to quickly index gobs of location data and query it efficiently via a simple HTTP interface.”

So how much does this all cost you’ll say – well, according to its products page, both Context and Places are free forever, with SLAs (service-level-agreements) and Premium Support offered as paid services. Right now, there is no pricing given for the Storage product. We’ll reach out to SimpleGeo to see if this “free forever” has any kind of month rate/API call limit, but nothing of the sort is listed on the website.

UPDATE: SimpleGeo got back to us, and yes, the APIs will be free forever regardless of the level of API usage. A spokesperson said, “Some companies/developers have asked us for a higher level of service, which we will offer for a fee.”

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As we reported last month, SimpleGeo has a new CEO now – Jay Adelson, who previously ran Digg – and this would seem to be the first major announcement since he joined. Also, we’re not exactly sure when SimpleGeo updated its website, but it is much slicker now.

So, if you’re a developer, will you be using these APIs? Let us know in the comments.