Google Maps Places API Cost

Definition

Google Places API pricing runs $17-$40 per 1,000 requests for the Pro and Enterprise SKUs that return real business data, with free caps of 10,000 (Essentials), 5,000 (Pro) and 1,000 (Enterprise) calls a month - the $200 monthly credit was retired. Scavio returns the same data at a flat 1 credit per call, about $4.30 per 1,000.

In Depth

Start with the change that breaks most cost estimates written before 2025: the $200 monthly credit is gone. Google Maps Platform replaced it with a per-SKU free cap, and the two models are not interchangeable. The old credit was one pooled $200 you could spend across any product; the new caps are per SKU and do not pool, so 10,000 free Geocoding calls buy you nothing on Text Search. If a budget you are working from divides $200 by a per-call rate, it is describing a plan Google retired — and so is most of what is currently written about this on the web.

The caps run by tier: Essentials SKUs get 10,000 free calls a month, Pro gets 5,000, Enterprise gets 1,000. Past the cap you pay per 1,000 requests, on a volume ladder that steps down as you scale. These are the SKUs people actually mean when they search for Places API pricing, at the first paid tier (cap to 100,000 requests a month):

ESSENTIALS                                 free cap    per 1,000
  Place Details Essentials (IDs Only)      unlimited   $0.00
  Text Search Essentials (IDs Only)        unlimited   $0.00
  Autocomplete Requests                    10,000      $2.83
  Place Details Essentials                 10,000      $5.00
  Geocoding                                10,000      $5.00

PRO                                        free cap    per 1,000
  Place Details Pro                        5,000       $17.00
  Address Validation Pro                   5,000       $17.00
  Nearby Search Pro                        5,000       $32.00
  Text Search Pro                          5,000       $32.00

ENTERPRISE                                 free cap    per 1,000
  Place Details Enterprise                 1,000       $20.00
  Place Details Enterprise + Atmosphere    1,000       $25.00
  Address Validation Enterprise            1,000       $25.00
  Nearby Search Enterprise                 1,000       $35.00
  Text Search Enterprise                   1,000       $35.00
  Nearby Search Enterprise + Atmosphere    1,000       $40.00

So the honest headline range is $17 to $40 per 1,000 requests for the Pro and Enterprise SKUs that return real business data, and $0 to $5 for the Essentials SKUs that mostly return identifiers. The volume ladder discounts steeply — Text Search Pro falls from $32 to $25.60 above 100,000 and to $2.40 above five million — but the ladder only helps at a scale most teams reading this will not reach.

The trap is which SKU your call actually bills to, because that is decided by the fields you ask for, not by the endpoint you call. Places API (New) bills Place Details at the Essentials rate when you request identifier fields, at Pro when you request the address, location, hours or rating, and at Enterprise when you request price level, reviews or atmosphere data. One extra field in a field mask moves the same request from $5 to $17 to $20 per 1,000. Teams that budget against the endpoint rather than the field mask routinely under-forecast by 3-4x, and the bill is the first place they find out.

The second trap is that photos bill separately. Places API Place Details Photos is its own Enterprise SKU at $7.00 per 1,000 with a 1,000-call free cap, so an app that renders a thumbnail for every result is running two billable events per place, not one.

Where Scavio is different is that there are no SKUs and no field masks. Every Google Maps call is 1 credit, flat, whichever fields come back — search, place details and reviews all cost the same, and the response carries the address, rating, review count, hours, phone and website whether or not you asked for them. On the $30 plan that works out near $4.30 per 1,000 calls against Google's $17 to $40 for the equivalent Pro and Enterprise data.

curl -X POST 'https://api.scavio.dev/api/v2/google/maps/search' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY' \
  -d '{"query": "coffee shops in Austin"}'

The response is the Maps payload verbatim — no field mask, no SKU decision, and the fields below are from a real capture rather than a schema:

import requests

r = requests.post(
    "https://api.scavio.dev/api/v2/google/maps/search",
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"},
    json={"query": "coffee shops in Austin"},
).json()

for place in r["local_results"]:
    print(
        place["title"],
        place["rating"],          # 4.5
        place["reviews"],         # 2497
        place["address"],
        place["place_id"],        # feed straight into /maps/place or /maps/reviews
    )

Four endpoints cover the same ground as the Places API: /api/v2/google/maps/search for a query, /api/v2/google/maps/place for one place by place_id or data_cid, /api/v2/google/maps/reviews for paginated reviews, and /api/v2/google/maps/geo-grid for local-rank tracking across a grid of coordinates. The first three are 1 credit each. Geo-grid is billed per grid point — an N x N grid costs N squared credits, so a 5 x 5 sweep is 25 — and a point that returns nothing is not charged.

Two things Google's pricing genuinely buys that this does not, and they matter. Places API comes with an SLA and a support contract, and it is the licensed path for storing and displaying Maps data inside a product under Google's terms. If you are shipping a consumer app that renders Google's place data in its UI, read those terms before optimising the bill. The cost comparison above is aimed at the other common case: research, monitoring, lead lists and rank tracking, where you need the data in a pipeline rather than on a licensed map.

Example Usage

Platforms

Google Places API cost is relevant across the following platforms, all accessible through Scavio's unified API:

• Google