Plein Air moved Bojangles’ location and mapping infrastructure to Radar, reporting a reduction in
maps cost of roughly 60% and setting out a plan to migrate a further 20 brands.

Why mapping is a bigger line item than it looks

Store locators read as a solved problem, which is why the cost tends to go unexamined. In practice
a restaurant brand hits mapping APIs on nearly every session: locating the guest, ranking nearby
stores, validating a delivery address, drawing the map, then geofencing arrival for curbside. Those
are separate billable calls, and they scale with traffic rather than with orders — so marketing
success raises the bill without raising revenue.

That is the shape of cost that survives for years without review. It is small enough per call to
stay below scrutiny and large enough in aggregate to matter, and it sits in engineering’s budget
while being driven by marketing’s decisions.

What a 60% reduction implies

A saving that size is rarely a better unit price. It usually means the call pattern itself changed
— caching results that do not move, collapsing several lookups into one, or dropping a rendered map
where a list of addresses was doing the actual work. The vendor switch is the occasion for that
audit rather than the cause of the saving.

The stated plan to bring 20 more brands across is the more telling detail. It implies the work was
done once as a reusable migration rather than as a bespoke project, which is the difference between
a client engagement and a platform capability.

The conversation

Leaders from Bojangles, Radar and Plein Air discussed the migration and the wider problem of
bridging digital and physical guest experience.

Radar’s own case-study page has since moved, so the figures above come from the summary that
accompanied it. Treat the 60% number as needing a second look before it goes anywhere public.

Radar also distributed the story through its own channels — see their LinkedIn post on the Bojangles work.