Today I received an email from Google regarding the business model for Google Maps. I haven’t understood all implications but from what I can see it looks like serious monetarization of what used to be a free service up to now. It might be time to move on.
Here’s the message:
"Hi,
Today we are announcing important changes, including our new name - Google Maps Platform, a simplified product structure, pay as you go pricing for all, and more. Please take a few minutes to review the announcement to familiarize yourself with the upcoming changes.
We would like to highlight a few updates that may impact your implementation. Beginning June 11th, we are launching our new pricing plan and providing all users access to support. We’ll continue to offer a free tier — all developers will receive $200 of free monthly usage of our core products.
In addition, this change will require you to enable billing and associate it with all of your Google Maps Platform projects. Creating a billing account helps us better understand your usage so we can continue developing helpful products. It also allows you to scale easily with less downtime and fewer performance issues if your product grows beyond the $200 of free monthly usage. For additional visibility and control you can set daily quotas or billing alerts."
Have not seen this email, but a couple things to think of.
Is this an email from Google? Check the email address.
If there is a link, be sure the link is an actual Google link.
I say this because my parents recently got an email from Apple telling them that they paid $75 for Pandora on their iTunes account. Of course, Apple does not have Pandora on the App Store, but my dad logged into the site as it looked like an Apple site. We found out later that it was phishing for emails and logins. Thank god my dad had two-factor authentication turned on so they could not get access to his account.
Just making sure you have checked that this is real.
Basically no difference to GoogleMaps. Maybe (if it is true what they claim) what they do with the data might be different. But regarding cookies and IP addresses they collect them as well.
My Google Maps stack should not be affected by this change at all. While the static maps API that I use is affected by these changes, I heavily cache the image so that we don’t need to query google on every page load. Therefore, you will never hit the 25k limit in a 24 hour period.
Haha… if they charged for Gmail they’d lose so much free data that they currently parse for marketing. Don’t worry, gmail will always be free and totally compromised.
I know what you mean but I can’t believe there’s not someone up in Google Towers who hasn’t pitched it. $1.99 a month. Be handy little extra revenue stream.
Manager 
