Google Maps Places API Cost

A local SEO agency tracked 2K businesses across 50 cities. Using Google Places API directly cost $3,200/month. They switched to Scavio's Google Maps search endpoint for the subset of data they actually used (business name, rating, address, category), dropping their cost to $300/month while retaining the signals their ranking reports needed.

Google Maps Places API Cost is relevant to Google. Scavio provides a unified API to access data from all of these platforms.

Google Maps Platform pricing for Places API in 2026: Place Search costs $32/1K requests, Place Details costs $17/1K requests, Place Photos costs $7/1K requests, and Autocomplete costs $2.83/1K requests (or $17/1K for session-based). The $200/month free credit helps small projects but runs out quickly for production workloads. A local business directory checking 1K businesses per day across search, details, and photos would cost roughly $56/day ($1,680/month) after the free credit runs out. For teams that need local business data (names, addresses, ratings, hours, phone numbers) without the full Places API feature set, search APIs offer an alternative path. Scavio's Google Maps search endpoint returns structured local business data at $0.005/credit, which is $5/1K requests -- roughly 3x to 8x cheaper than direct Places API calls depending on the endpoint. The tradeoff: the Places API returns richer data (live hours, photos, review text) while a search API returns the data visible in search results (name, rating, address, category, snippet). For monitoring, competitive analysis, and directory building, search-based local data is sufficient and dramatically cheaper.