Web developers - help re cities database pls??

[FusionChefGeoff]

I am working on a project which involves some web development - I have never done this before but we have asked for a "search cities" database which never seems to have the cities I need in it! The developers are very resistant to us questioning this and say that they have compiled their own database made up of lots of different ones. This sounds odd to me.

Can you just buy (admittedly probably for lots of money!) a comprehensive list of worldwide cities which you 'plug in' to your own website that can then be searched??

Where from and for what kind of money?? I'd like to go back to them with some knowledge / authority as I just don't trust them

There is [[http://www.unece.org/cefact/locode/welcome.html]] it's free and I think it's comprehensive, used for shipping/haulage etc.

For a website I worked on recently we used PCA Predict to allow people to look up their address, this is pretty much just plugin. That one is global to varying degrees of accuracy (some countries aren't great for addresses). They are paying per lookup, 3.7-5.5p per address lookup.

Wow, link fail (I swear I can to links in regular html ) UN/LOCODE
PCA Predict

Thank you! We definitely need global. I'll have a look at that link in more detail later - so if we had 4,000 B2B customers using the database to select the cities they have offices in (max 10 per customer) to advertise to their market - that makes 40,000 x 0.04p = £1,600??

£1,480 assuming you buy the best value packs, but if you were doing that many lookup you might be better off contacting them asking for a bespoke quote.

It would probably be less though, surely not all the customers would fill in all 10?

No you're absolutely right, they won't, but I just need a ball park figure and wanted to make sure I'd understood it right. Great thank you!

You can check Dataquality