For years my favourite routing site used both Google & Cloudmade routing engines. Google didn't include cycling but Cloudmade did, you had the choice, it was great. The Cloudmade engine was fast, too.
Then Cloudmade disappeared and they only offered Google routing for cars and walkers, so you could either take your bike up the motorway/autostrada/autobahn/whatever or that scenic hiking route straight up Lover's Leap.
So I decided to set up my own site & base it on Cloudmade. I set up an account, acquired a key, dived into the docs and started beavering. It was much clearer than Google's API, a real delight to program. For about 3 months my spare time was spent chortling with beaverish glee.
Several months ago the API wiki disappeared from Cloudmade's site. Uh-oh.
This morning the axe fell: "Cloudmade are moving to new business model": $25 per million map tiles. On 1st May support for existing free services will be withdrawn.
So now I have the choice of watching my beautiful routing prog die, or rehashing > 15,000 lines of code for Google, Mapquest or some other.
Yetch.