Ever since the new pricing took place, I've been confused with their documentation. I don't know where to see the details about this. (Or I'm not really looking properly, pardon me.)
So is it possible to only avail Google's Geocoding Service? Without the other services as a package.
Here is a link to the new billing documentation.
And here is the pricing page.
If I may try to simplify:
The Geocoding service you want to use now costs money to use.
The price is US $5 per 1,000 usage per month.
Google is freely giving every user 200$ worth of usage per month.
That means you can use the Geocoding approximately 40,000 times in a month and not have to pay anything.
Related
I wish Google can break it down explaining this.
Says, if I was a manager with no developing code experience, there is no way that I could get the answer from Google support with the information provided for everyone.
I just don't understand how SKU usage work. Is it per point on a map that need SKU? Is it per whole set of points? If I have 30 points on my road destination, does that means that I used 30 SKU?
Can someone explain this?
If you are using Google Maps Platform APIs, please know that it uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model - meaning all APIs under Google Map Platform are billed by SKU. SKU is a combination of 'Product API' and 'Service or Function you used'. Each combination has a price and cost is calculated by SKU Usage x Price per each use.
So you will be billed depending on which services you are using. You can learn more about this on this link.
If you have more specific question with your project and to open a more personalized channel, I suggest that you create a support case to reach out with the support team.
I want to make sure that my app do not accidentally consume more credits than I can afford. How can I set such limits of weekly or monthly consumption?
Unfortunately billing cap is not yet possible so you will need to calculate your own spending per the pricing info here in combination with your own metering (see some open source projects here).
Will let Engineering know it is good to have the budgeting feature soon as possible and update this answer when it’s available.
Google Places changed its pricing model last summer and the additional costs are pretty step and I might have to discontinue a research project on mine. Is it possible to query just the basic information for a place and not be charged for a place details request? My query is:
https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/details/json?key=MYCOMPANYKEY&placeid=ChIJMfEXesb724ARlhTq8RBG5jY&fields=name,place_id,permanently_closed
The only bit of information I need is if the place is permanently closed. Reading the documentation, it looks like this is a basic field and should be free (link here to the basic data sku), however when I run the query I am charged $17 / 1000 queries. Is there anyway to query this without paying for a Place Details query?
The Places API price consists of two parts: price of request you executed and the data price. The price of request is $17 / 1000. In addition you can get some data for free and some data for additional cost depending on the list of fields that you provided. There is no Google Places API for free, you always pay at least the request.
Have a look at Google Maps Platform pricing sheet for more details:
https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/pricing/sheet/
Also official documentation states:
Data requests generate a charge in addition to the cost of the Places request. Data charges are always in tandem with the Places requests.
source: https://developers.google.com/maps/billing/understanding-cost-of-use#data-skus
I hope this clarifies your doubt.
In addition to the answer of Xomena, you may cap your request up until your free credits are consumed, upon setting up your billing account, you will be entitled to have one time $300 free credit (Usable for any Google Cloud Platform products) and a monthly recurring $200 free credit (Exclusive for Google Maps API only), so you can still use the API without being billed.
Capping API Usage:
Go to the GCP Console APIs & Services Dashboard
page.
From the projects list, select a project.
Click the name of the API you're interested in.
Click Quotas.
On the quota line you want to change, click the edit icon, then enter your preferred total quota, up to the limit specified by Google.
Based on my calculation, assuming that you are only using Place Details, you can call up to 11764 requests(w/ basic data) per month using your $200 free credit, I did not include the $300 credit in my computation as this is not recurring every month and this will be up to you on how you will spread the $300 free credit.
In their notifications about the new billing system for the Google Maps APIs, Google very clearly state that you "can set usage limits to protect against unexpected increases". However, I haven't found any documentation regarding how to set these usage limits against an API key. Does anyone know how to do this?
To clarify, I would like to set my own daily usage limits against my API key to prevent it ever going over the free threshold for the static maps API.
I understand Google means that you can set your custom daily quota for each individual API in order to stay within free 200$, not a global per API key/project/Billing account daily quota. As far as I know there is no such thing as limit per daily usage in $ per Billing account yet.
There are alerts that you can establish in your Billing account and receive notifications if your usage is close to the defined budget. Have a look at the following document that explain how to set alerts:
https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/budgets?hl=en
If your project uses only Static Maps API, it is easy to set daily quota to stay within 200$ per month. The price sheet says that you can have up to 100 000 free requests per month. That means 100 000 / 31 = 3225 free requests per day. You can go to Quota section of Static Maps API in your project
https://console.developers.google.com/google/maps-apis/apis/static-maps-backend.googleapis.com/quotas?project=YOUR_PROJECT_ID&duration=PT1H
and change your daily quota as shown in my screenshots
edit number requests per day
and you are set.
I hope this helps!
OK a bit late for reply, but maybe somebody else can use this.
You do get tons of free map hits etc.
If you don't link a pay account, then you are limited to 1 hit per day (that's google maps) which is useless. All other quotas like 10000 per 100 sec etc are secondary to the 1 hit per day.
Now once you have linked your pay account or a Credit Card etc, to google development console then you get full quota for free user, plus more if you go over your quota covered by your Credit Card.
However don't panic, for first year it's all free and you get $300 (at this moment) worth of free stuff.
Even if you go over this limit Google will first ask you if you wish to change to payment system or continue with free.
If you decide to pay then you will be charged per indicated on google dev site.
If you decide to go with free option then the service to your site will stop until next rotation, i.e. day or month etc depending on service.
see this table.
Unless you have millions of hit on your map page or app, then the free quota is more than enough for normal sites.
Here is a price calculator by google.
As you see you get a lot of unlimited stuff and some paid if you go over your recurring credit of $200 or $300
Google makes it so complicated because it involves people coming from old system and those registering between roll over etc.
perhaps this will help too.
You can also set budgets and alerts just in case you go over budget (via Billing section of dev site)
So in short :) you get tons of free and if you have a lot of visitors the surely you make some money to pay for the services.
Note that google charges for all their API services in 1 place so if you use say Geocoding and firebase and cloud dev etc then you will soon start paying.
Sorry for any typos, I did this fast.
Capping API Usage
Depending on the API, you can explicitly cap requests in a variety of ways, including: requests per day, requests per 100 seconds, and requests per 100 seconds per user.
You might want to limit the billable usage by setting caps. For example, to prevent getting billed for usage beyond the free courtesy usage limits, you can set requests per day caps.
For more info, check this doc: https://cloud.google.com/apis/docs/capping-api-usage
I'm working on an idea for a service that uses geocoded data (lat/lng) form a US address. Google maps API v3 has been awesome, until I read the terms of service and acceptable uses a little closer. The problem is that the terms seem to prohibit use of the maps API for any commercial use where the site is not freely accessibly to the public, such as a subscription based service. The alternative offered is Google Maps API Premier, but at $10,000 per year minimum, it's just not possible at this time.
Same goes for services offered by Yahoo! and MS - initial fees are small for enterprises, but for a very early stage startup (not even a finished prototype yet!) it's just not doable.
Geocoding process needs to be real-time and volume would be very small - user would enter address at setup time and only update it if needed.
Any help is greatly appreciated!
I've used geocoder.us for a few projects. They do require sign up for a commercial license, on the upside it only costs $50 per 20,000 lookups. I haven't used their commercial services though to know how reliable they are, but during startup and especially because there will primarily only be one lookup per user from what you say, this seems like a safe bet.
The software company I work for (Safe Software) has incorporated a geocoding service into our product (FME). The service is pxpoint from Proxix. I hear good things, so perhaps it's worth checking them out?
WorldWeatherOnline offers a geocoding API as part of their weather forecast service. The accuracy isn't great though. In some parts of my country, I'm getting bogus results. Their support has not been helpful in this matter.