That's a pretty cynical interpretation. To me it seems more like they took an easy engineering approach when the cost per API call was low, then when the price

That's a pretty cynical interpretation. To me it seems more like they took an easy engineering approach when the cost per API call was low, then when the price went up they re-designed their software to use API calls more frugally by using some domain specific knowledge (that google couldn't know about so wouldn't be able to build in to their pricing).