Posted by Ken Hoetmer, Product Manager, Google Maps APIs

The Google Maps Web Service APIs offer a powerful toolkit for the real world - including geocoding, directions, elevation for any point on earth, and snapping GPS crumbs to the road network.

Today we’re introducing a simple and flexible option for developers to instantly and easily scale with these Web Service APIs, by opening them up to pay-as-you-go purchasing via the Google Developers Console. In this new purchasing structure, the Google Maps Geocoding, Directions, Distance Matrix, Roads, Geolocation, Elevation, and Time Zone APIs remain free of charge for the first 2,500 requests per day, and developers may now simply pay $0.50 USD per 1,000 additional requests up to 100,000 requests per API per day. Developers requiring over 100,000 requests per day should contact us to purchase a premium licence.

To get started, head over to our updated Google Maps APIs developer site to check out the APIs, get a key, and provide your billing details to enable the higher limits.

Lastly, alongside this change we’ve updated our Google Maps/Earth APIs Terms of Service to include a section on payment terms as well as some clarifications to the deprecation policy, turn-by-turn navigation restrictions and derivative data sets.

Enjoy!