5 ms·

It's mostly free actually, and the pricing is very flexible otherwise: http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/06/lower-pricing-and-simplified-limits.html

• watty 14y ago
  Or pay a small $10k+ fee if you want to do one of these common things: * Your site is only available to paying customers. * Your site is only accessible within your company or on your intranet. * Your application relates to enterprise dispatch, fleet management, business asset tracking, or similar applications.
  • capo 14y ago
    They have different billing structure for enterprise stuffs, so!? businesses can usually negotiate terms with sales reps. If I remember correctly they were fined for giving enterprise access for free: http://searchengineland.com/french-court-fines-google-660000-dollars-google-maps-109930 http://searchengineland.com/french-court-fines-google-660000...
    • watty 14y ago
      My point was that it's not "mostly free", any serious business or website with a decent amount of traffic will be paying $$.
    • taligent 14y ago
      And if you are building a startup that wants to compete in these markets ? The definition of enterprise is pretty arbitrary these days.
      • imechura 14y ago
        From my understanding you only get charged when accessing the map API server side. If you use the JS API in the client's browser the requests don't count against your quota. Google even suggests that your script can pass the information back to your server to be stored. Therefore, you can scale your user base without incurring high costs.
        • untog 14y ago
          That's not true. The number of client API loads are counted, but the number of map tiles loaded by that client is not. i.e. you are charged per page load, irrespective of the user activity on that page.
          • hayksaakian 14y ago
            Given for example the geocoding API, which is js based and requires no API key, I don't see how they would know who to charge.
            • untog 14y ago
              As stated by the docs: Use of the Google Geocoding API is subject to a query limit of 2,500 geolocation requests per day if you're using the server endpoint, which perhaps checks what server the request is coming from- I have no idea. The JS, client-side version definitely requires a key.
• taligent 14y ago
  It's 50c per 1000 requests. So if you were building a semi-popular website or iPhone app with 10K requests/day it would be $150 a month. In what bizarro world is that mostly free ?
  • chrisbroadfoot 14y ago
    You only get charged if you go over 25K/day. So if your app did 10K/day, it would be completely free ;-) If you did 35K/day (every day), it would cost $150/mo.
  • untog 14y ago
    In addition to what chrisbroadfoot said, 10K requests for $5? In what bizarro world is that a problem, given the service you are receiving?
    • taligent 14y ago
      Remember that's 10K requests for $5 NOW. We could see it jump back to its original price at any time of Google's choosing which would have been $40. But the 10K requests bit is arbitrary. My point is that it is not mostly free. It's not really even close to being free.
      • untog 14y ago
        Well sure, the price of anything can change in the future. It's difficult to plan for that. But as others have said, you get 25K free per day. It really depends how big your audience is as to whether it's "mostly" free.
    • dantiberian 14y ago
      Exactly, you are receiving a valuable service which is best in class for what it does. If you are using it at commercial levels then paying for it makes sense. If your business has enough traffic to fall into the paid tier and you can't afford $5 per 10K requests then something is probably wrong with your business model.