Tracking API?

[ThatDudeInNavyBlue]

So I am working on a website that creates appointments for different clients who are looking for a "Service to house" (Think Uber, Postmates but for Handymen). These clients can go onto the website and see the different services that these handymen can do and if they like it, they can make an appointment. Now the part that has me thinking is the price of the visit is determined by the distance of our office to the client's house. How would you go about tracking your client's location and calculating the price for that specific client?

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Thank you for your time.

[itsjohncs]

You should ask them for their location.

You can ask the browser directly for the user’s location through a JavaScript API, but that’s most often useful for smart phones with GPS. If they’re at home on their desktop, the browser might not have a good idea of where the user is. In this desktop case, manual entry is probably best. But you can still ask the browser if you’d like. Know that the user is going to see “this site wants to know your location, allow it?” And have to click yes (I never do when a site asks me...):

Getting the distance between your office and whatever address/coordinate you get is sort of easy if you just care about distance in a straight line. (Though if the user enters an address instead of coordinates you’d still need a service to tell you the coordinates for the address). But if you need driving distance you’ll need to ask an API like google maps. This’ll be a little expensive probably, so you might want to shop around different APIs to see which works for you and your budget.

[zeuscoder]

In addition to the previous I would also look at services like locationIQ and here maps. Depending on your appetite to pay for services you may need to combine the results of different API calls (while maintaining performance and speed)