Are you spending a lot of money paying your Google Maps bills? If the answer is yes, then please keep on reading. In this article, we will be outlining a few steps you can take to reduce your Google Maps bills.
How Does Google Maps Billing Work?
Google Maps billing works with a “pay for what you use” model. The more features of the platform you use on your website, the more it costs.
Every month you will get $200 worth of free map loads. If you stay within this quota, you will not get any extra charge. However, when you exceed this $200 quota, you will then need to pay for any extra use of features that your website is using.
Please see the following article for a list of individual costs for each service.
How Much Does it Cost to Maintain Google Maps?
Google provides its customers with $200 worth of map usage which is renewed every month. This roughly translates into 28,500 map loads per month without any extra charge. Once you exceed this amount only then are you charged for additional use of the Platform API.
Therefore, It all depends on how much traffic your website is getting. For small to normal-size websites, the $200 quota will be more than enough to get through the month without any extra charges. However, for high-traffic websites, you can expect to get an estimated bill of more than $700 per month.
Can I Use Google Maps Without Billing?
As of 11 June 2018, you need to have a billing account to use the services of the Google Map API on your website. The good news is that it takes only a few minutes to set up a billing account so that shouldn’t be an issue. Moreover, even with a billing account, you can still operate your website at zero cost if you stay within the free $200 monthly quota.
How Do I Reduce My Google Maps Bills?
If you are faced with high-costing Google Maps bills, you can potentially reduce this bill by making a few minor changes to how you operate your website.
The first and most important step is to protect your API keys. In addition, you have to make sure that you have applied the web referrer of your site to protect them.
Google Maps has its own load counting and it is not possible to avoid those map calls. However, there are ways to reduce the bill if you are getting too much of it. Moreover, to reduce the amount on your Google Maps bills you can try out the below steps to reduce the map calls.
1- Is your store locator on your home page? then it may be loading unnecessarily, and many users may not be using it. In this case, you can create a new page for the store locator with a link to it on your header menu.
2- You can avoid using Place API and instead opt for the Geocoding API. This will reduce a lot of extra requests. However, the downside is that it works with the enter key or search button instead of typing ahead for the address.
3- Avoid using the Direction API. Instead, enable the feature to redirect the directions to be shown in the Google Maps app.
Conclusion
Still not satisfied with the results? it may only happen if you have a lot of traffic on your site, the reason for this is that Google itself provides a 200 USD free quota to each account. Therefore, if you stay within the limits, your Google Maps bills will be a big zero.
However, for sites having a lot of traffic, such as having more than 30K page loads of the store locator, you can try out our Store Locator which renders all your stores in a list format without a map. Moreover, all your stores will still be searchable and it comes with all available filters.
