Saturday, November 03, 2018

More Google Maps annoyances

The other day I got another email from Google

Hi,

In June 2016, we announced a change to Maps JavaScript API requests. At that time, we gave you temporary free usage based on your consumption to ensure that your applications would continue to function. The services included in this transition period were: Elevation, Directions, Distance Matrix, Geocoding and Places.

We appreciate you as a loyal and long-standing customer. Our goal is to make sure everyone is on a simple, consistent, and scalable plan with Google Maps Platform.Starting on November 29, 2018, we will bill all your usage for Elevation, Directions, Distance Matrix, Geocoding and Places, according to our new pricing plan.

To help you with this transition, we will provide you with two months of credits, which we will automatically apply to your billing account. Please read our FAQs to understand what these credits cover and how to estimate your monthly bill.

Thank you for using Google Maps Platform.

The Google of 2016 was clearly a different company to the Google of 2018, since grandfathering of old customers when a radical change to pricing is introduced is exactly the right thing to do unlike the recent shenanigans. And generally grandfathering is a permanent thing…

So once again I’m going to have to spend some time switching things off, moving other stuff over to one of Google’s many competitors who have more sane pricing and making other things require a Google Maps API key (the route elevation page now does, sorry)

4 comments:

Lucky Ali said...

Sir Your elevation gain feature was the best on the internet but now it's not working . please do something about it .we cyclist need it badly .

Doogal said...

It should work OK if you provide a Google Maps API key? You need to set one up using the instructions provided

Anonymous said...

For those of us not fully au fait with such things, what does this mean
in practical terms? Will we be billed by Google?

Doogal said...

It's possible you could be billed, but you get $200 of free requests per month, which equates to 40,000 elevation requests. I'd guess a route generally uses up 10 requests (I bundle up 100 locations into a single request) so for a single user I'd be surprised if you hit the $200 limit