Saturday, July 21, 2018

The economics of the new Google Maps API pricing

The insane new pricing for the Google Maps API with a $200 per month credit leads to an odd situation. For anyone using less than $200 a month, Google Maps is probably the best option (although other map providers also generally have some kind of free tier). For anyone going over that limit, you’d have to be insane to use Google Maps since it now costs so much more than other map providers.

So if you’re in a similar situation to me and you have a bunch of pages using Google Maps, the sensible option is to convert them until you get to a stage where your Google costs are approximately $6.67 per day. The Billings Report in the Google APIs console gives a fairly up to date picture of what’s going on (turn off the ‘Include credit in costs’ option). My current costs are about $20 per day so some work still to be done.

I’d much prefer to be improving the site, but since Google have decided to be dicks, I have to rewrite stuff until I’m no longer paying them a penny…