Good Enough Maps What Google Places API actually costs in 2026
A typical place-search workload on the Places API (New) bills through the Text Search Pro SKU at $32.00 per 1,000 calls once you pass the free monthly allowance of 5,000 calls. So 100,000 searches a month runs about $3,040 before volume discounts, and 1,000,000 runs about $22,000. The exact figure swings on which response fields you request: ask for ratings and the same call jumps to Enterprise; ask for reviews and it jumps again to Enterprise + Atmosphere.
That’s the short answer. The rest of this explains where those numbers come from, because Google’s own pricing changed shape in March 2025 and the old mental models no longer apply.
How Google Maps Platform pricing changed in March 2025
On March 1, 2025, Google replaced the flat $200 monthly credit with per-SKU free thresholds. Every stock keeping unit (SKU, Google’s term for a single billable API operation) now gets its own free monthly call count instead of all services sharing one pooled credit.
The catalog is split into three categories: Essentials, Pro, and Enterprise. The free monthly thresholds are 10,000 calls for Essentials SKUs, 5,000 for Pro, and 1,000 for Enterprise, with a few exceptions (Map Tiles gets 100,000). Thresholds reset on the first of each month and don’t roll over.
If you still budget around “the first $200 is free,” stop. That credit is gone. A workload that used to sit comfortably under the credit can now bill from the first call past a much smaller per-SKU allowance.
There’s a second change that trips people up. Google moved the original Places API to Legacy status. You can no longer enable the legacy Places API on new projects; existing users can keep using it, but anything new builds on the Places API (New), which is the version priced below. Same brand, different SKUs, different numbers.
Which SKUs a place search actually hits
A place search reads from three families of SKUs: Text Search, Nearby Search, and Place Details. The catch is that each is tiered by the fields you request, and you’re billed at the highest tier any requested field belongs to.
For Text Search, the tiers map to fields like this:
- Essentials (IDs Only): returns only identifiers/resource names, not display names, locations, or addresses. Unlimited free, but a bare ID isn’t a usable result on its own.
- Pro ($32.00 / 1,000): adds the fields you actually want, including display name, formatted address, location, types, and photos.
- Enterprise ($35.00 / 1,000): adds
rating, opening hours, phone, website, and price fields. - Enterprise + Atmosphere ($40.00 / 1,000): adds
reviews, payment options, dine-in, outdoor seating, editorial summaries, and similar venue attributes.
So the realistic price for “search for places near here and show me names and addresses” is the Pro SKU. The IDs-only tier is free but rarely useful by itself, because you’d then pay again on Place Details to turn each ID into a real result.
Here are the per-1,000-call prices for the SKUs a search workload commonly touches, from Google’s core services price list (first volume tier, 0 to 100,000 calls):
| SKU | Free monthly | Price / 1,000 |
|---|---|---|
| Text Search Pro | 5,000 | $32.00 |
| Text Search Enterprise | 1,000 | $35.00 |
| Text Search Enterprise + Atmosphere | 1,000 | $40.00 |
| Nearby Search Pro | 5,000 | $32.00 |
| Place Details Essentials | 10,000 | $5.00 |
| Place Details Pro | 5,000 | $17.00 |
| Place Details Enterprise | 1,000 | $20.00 |
| Autocomplete (per request) | 10,000 | $2.83 |
| Geocoding | 10,000 | $5.00 |
What a Text Search workload costs at 10K, 100K, and 1M calls
Below are worked monthly costs for the Text Search Pro SKU. Assumptions: every call is Pro tier (names, addresses, locations, no ratings, reviews, or atmosphere fields), and the only billable SKU is Text Search itself (no separate Place Details lookups). Volume discounts apply automatically per the price list once you cross the breakpoints.
| Monthly calls | Billable calls | Arithmetic | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 | 5,000 | (10,000 - 5,000 free) ÷ 1,000 × $32.00 | $160 |
| 100,000 | 95,000 | (100,000 - 5,000) ÷ 1,000 × $32.00 | $3,040 |
| 1,000,000 | 995,000 | tiered: see below | ~$22,880 |
The million-call figure uses Google’s volume tiers. After the 5,000 free calls, the first 100,000 bill at $32.00/1,000, the next 400,000 (100K to 500K) at $25.60, the next 500,000 (500K to 1M) at $19.20:
- 95,000 × $32.00/1,000 = $3,040
- 400,000 × $25.60/1,000 = $10,240
- 500,000 × $19.20/1,000 = $9,600
- Total: $22,880
(Rounding and exact breakpoint placement move this by a few hundred dollars; treat it as the right order of magnitude, not a quote.) Tiers keep stepping down to $9.60/1,000 from 1M to 5M and $2.40/1,000 above 5M, so very high volume is meaningfully cheaper per call.
Swap in ratings, opening hours, phone numbers, websites, or price data and every one of those calls reprices at the Enterprise SKU ($35.00 instead of $32.00). Add reviews or atmosphere fields and it’s $40.00. The field mask is the single biggest lever on your bill.
The gotchas that produce surprise invoices
Four things turn a reasonable estimate into a larger one.
Field masks silently upgrade your SKU. The pricing is set by the most expensive field in your request, not by the cheapest. One stray rating in a field mask moves an entire endpoint from Pro to Enterprise. Audit the exact fields you request.
Autocomplete bills differently than you’d guess. Autocomplete charges per request (each keystroke-driven call), unless you use session tokens to group a typing session with its final Place Details call. Without sessions, a search box that fires on every keystroke can multiply call volume well past your headcount of actual searches.
Billing is per request, not per result. Google bills per billable event, so a Text Search that returns zero results still costs the same as one that returns twenty. Empty searches, retries, and health checks all bill.
There is no hard spending cap by default. Budget alerts in Google Cloud notify you, they don’t stop usage. To actually halt spend you have to wire budget notifications to a Pub/Sub topic and a function that disables billing on the project, which kills every service in that project, not just Maps. You can also set per-API usage quotas as a blunter cap. None of this is on by default, and there’s a reporting lag, so overage can land before the killswitch fires.
That last point is the one that bites teams whose traffic spikes: a popular weekend or a scraping bot becomes a real invoice, not a stopped service.
Where Good Enough Maps fits
Good Enough Maps does one slice of this well: proximity place search near a coordinate. It’s worth a look only if that’s the workload driving your Places bill.
The plans are flat: $0 for 10,000 searches a month, $19 for 100,000, $99 for 1,000,000. Every plan has a hard cap: when you reach it, the API returns HTTP 402 and stops until the next reset. It never bills an overage. A search endpoint that goes viral is a 402, not an invoice, with no budget-alert plumbing to set up.
Coverage is 39 million places across 18 countries and territories, built from the open Overture Maps Foundation data. A search is one GET request with a server-side bearer key, no SDK and no per-field SKU table to reason about.
The scope is deliberately narrow. This is nearby search around a point. It does not do autocomplete, geocoding, routing, or map tiles. If your bill is driven by an address autocomplete box, turn-by-turn directions, or a tile-based map UI, Google Maps Platform or another full platform is still the right tool, and pairs fine alongside a specialist search.
For a side-by-side on the search workload specifically, see the Google Places API comparison, or run a live query on the homepage without signing up.
FAQ
Is Google Places API free?
Only up to a per-SKU monthly threshold. Each SKU on the Places API (New) gets a free monthly call count (5,000 for Text Search Pro, 10,000 for Essentials-tier SKUs), after which you pay per 1,000 calls. The old flat $200 monthly credit no longer exists.
What replaced the $200 Google Maps credit?
On March 1, 2025, Google replaced the $200 monthly credit with per-SKU free thresholds: 10,000 free monthly calls for Essentials SKUs, 5,000 for Pro, and 1,000 for Enterprise. Free usage is now scoped to each SKU rather than pooled across all of them.
How do I cap Google Maps API spending?
Budget alerts notify you but do not stop usage. To enforce a real cap you set per-API usage quotas, or wire a budget alert to a function that disables billing on the project, which stops all services in that project. Neither is enabled by default.
What’s the difference between Places API and Places API (New)?
The original Places API is now Legacy and can’t be enabled on new projects. New work uses the Places API (New), which has its own SKUs and the tiered field-based pricing described above. Existing legacy users can keep their integration for now.
Why did my Places API bill go up after adding a field?
Because Places API (New) bills at the highest SKU tier among your requested fields. Adding rating moves a call from Pro ($32.00/1,000) to Enterprise ($35.00/1,000); adding reviews or atmosphere fields pushes it to $40.00/1,000.
Prices last validated 2026-06-12 against Google Maps Platform’s official pricing pages. Google changes SKUs and tiers periodically, so confirm the current price list before any procurement decision.