The Maps example is real. However in their confused current branding Google Maps Platform is outside of Google Cloud Platform yet within Google Cloud, alongside

The Maps example is real. However in their confused current branding Google Maps Platform is outside of Google Cloud Platform yet within Google Cloud, alongside Chrome, Android, and G Suite. They haven't done any pricing change like that, nor anything else effectively equivalent to forced short-notice deprecation, for generally available Google Cloud Platform services. (The famous Google App Engine pricing change happened upon GAE's departure from preview.) Hopefully the new CEO can disentangle the horribly messy branding conflation of orgs which work rather differently. Google is now effectively a conglomerate, even ignoring Alphabet, maybe even multiple conglomerates within Google. The impacts of their org chart on their users shouldn't be this opaque to people who haven't worked at Google. (Disclosure: I have worked there, though not since 2015.)