Freshness: what stale sheets cost
An address database is not a map of the world — it is a photograph of the world on the day it was built. Every month after that, the photograph and the world drift apart. This page explains how we measure that drift, sheet against sheet, and what it means when your geocoder falls months — then years — behind.
Addresses are born, renamed and corrected every month
National address registries are living documents. Three kinds of change accumulate in them continuously, and none of them announce themselves to your database.
New construction
A finished building gets its house numbers registered; a new development gets a whole new street. Until your sheet catches up, every one of those addresses is a guaranteed miss — the record simply is not there to be found.
Street renames & renumbering
Municipalities rename streets and occasionally renumber them. The old name still geocodes — to a record the registry no longer stands behind — while the new name, the one on the customer's order, finds nothing.
Registry fixes
Registries correct themselves: a pin moved from the parcel centroid to the entrance, a wrong postal code fixed, a duplicate merged. Each fix is small; in aggregate they decide whether the courier stops at the right door.
How we measure drift
Every GridPin release is built from one reproducible stream per country. Because consecutive streams have the same shape, two releases can be diffed exactly — address by address, not by file size.
-
Key every address
Each record is identified by its normalized street key plus house number and suffix — the same key the engine indexes on. Two releases talking about the same address always agree on the key.
-
Diff two sheets
A script joins the old and new build streams on that key. For Overture-sourced countries the diff measures sheet drift against the Overture release (upstream), not the national registry directly; both snapshots are keyed with the same normalizer version so rule changes don't masquerade as drift. What exists only in the new sheet is added; only in the old sheet, removed.
-
Flag real changes
For addresses present in both, the record counts as moved when the coordinate shifts by more than 50 m or the postal code changes. Sub-50 m jitter is ignored — it is below what a delivery operation cares about.
Drift between releases
Registry drift per country between releases. A free-tier sheet is static, so its gap to the registry only grows — this table shows what a single release cycle skips past, measured by the diff method above.
| Country | Added | Removed | Moved >50 m | % of sheet |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| France BAN | — | — | — | — |
| Italy Overture / ANNCSU | — | — | — | — |
| Netherlands Overture / BAG | — | — | — | — |
| Serbia Overture / RGZ | — | — | — | — |
This table is empty on purpose. A diff needs two snapshots, and monthly rebuilds start with the paid plans, which are still in preparation. We will not publish estimates in place of measurements. Once a second sheet exists to compare against, the real counts land here — whatever they turn out to be.
For delivery, a miss is not a statistic
Drift percentages look small until you multiply them by an order volume. Every address your geocoder cannot resolve — or resolves to the wrong building — is one concrete failure downstream.
A miss is a failed order
The parcel goes back to the depot, the courier loses a stop, support takes a call, and the redelivery costs more than the first attempt. A new-construction address that is not in your sheet fails every single time until the sheet is updated.
Staleness is silent
A stale sheet does not throw errors. It confidently returns yesterday's answer — the old street name, the pre-correction pin. The failure shows up in your delivery stats weeks later, not in your logs today.
Cadence is the fix
Free sheets are static — their gap to the registry only grows. Starter and Pro ship a fresh sheet every month — so the gap between the registry and your database stays one month wide.