Google introduces new pricing plans for Maps API

By Aleks Buczkowski



 


Back in 2012 Google introduced fees for developers using Maps API. Developers were offered Google Maps Premium – a paid for service starting from $10,000 a year, which also offers branded maps and custom uses of Google Maps. If they opt not to pay for this, fees were $4 per 1,000 page loads over the 25,000 per day – or $10 per Street View load over the 10,000 per day. Smaller and bigger players like Foursquare immediately started to switch to other platforms and after just couple of weeks Google had to quickly lower prices. The mess of these business decisions was still visible in APIs pricing plans.

This week together with a new logo Google has finally brought in much needed change to this pricing. The Maps API team said:


Today we’re introducing a simple and flexible option for developers to instantly and easily scale with these Web Service APIs, by opening them up to pay-as-you-go purchasing via the Google Developers Console.

In this new purchasing structure, the Google Maps APIs (Geocoding, Directions, Distance Matrix, Roads, Geolocation, Elevation, and Time Zone) will be free of charge for the first 2,500 requests per day, and developers will pay $0.50 USD per 1,000 additional requests up to 100k requests per API per day. Developers with over 100k requests per day will get a premium pricing model.

Frankly speaking it’s quite expensive. Let’s say that I will make an app which gets 100.000 downloads in the first week. I will have to pay Google for 99750 requests * $0.50 = $48.750. Hmmm… I’ll probably use OpenStreetMap.

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