Really sad to see. I've been very happy with Mapzen for the past year or so.
Their open source stuff is really good, and the service itself is excellent as well. Not quite as polished as Google/Mapbox, but absolutely usable in production apps.
Would be very interested to read a post mortem. Did they simply struggle to find users, was their pricing strategy wrong, was quality an issue?
If anyone at Mapzen is reading these comments, thank you for all the work you've done. I'll miss you guys.
I know a bunch of the team there but don't know all the inside scoop.
They were trying freemium with the hosted services but not many people were paying. One of the issues (imo) is that there really isn't open traffic data (but there should be). This really hampers some of the more interesting routing things and they were focused on a lot of the more multi-modal and pulling in elevation data for biking, etc. Some people were doing some pretty cool stuff with their tools but I think in the end Google gives away enough API transactions for most people and the quality is good enough.
Can you elaborate on your comment on the open traffic data? Is it difficult to acquire?
From what I understand of real time traffic data, most of it is generated from mobile users themselves. That means for the most part it'll be Google, and to a lesser extent Apple.
If Google thinks it's in its advantage to keep that data closed to benefit their business model, then no one else has access to it.
https://github.com/graphhopper/open-traffic-collection
But no, although Google and Apple (and also Mapbox!) do not give a away their traffic data, there are still three sources for world wide traffic data:
TomTom, HERE and inrix. All acquire their data via external software companies or automotive companies (or whatever) including their measurement units into their products.
Mapzen was starting their open traffic data project and so we at Graphhopper were hoping they would solve this issue in the next years, but now, obviously they won't: