You could always use Leaflet or even d3.geo (or cesium or whatever) and just buy whatever tiles and data you need from the many providers who offer them. You would only need to buy for the areas you service and could buy new tiles annually or when you expand into new areas, just like you do with your car's GPS. You can buy rasters and vector data from so many providers, and actually get a lot higher quality data than Google in some cases (for some areas). This also affords you complete control over the map style, although some providers like Mapbox allow you a lot of control over look and feel via their StyleJSON stuff.
Also if it really is such a big part of your product, I don't really think $80 per day (for 15k unique users) as an operational cost is all that much honestly. And if you have a single page app, Google only charges for the first load anyways. They may have greatly increased the prices, but it does reflect the value they are providing and the tone taken in the article comes off as freeloading and ignorant of the effort level and value of providing such a service.
People also need to note that Google's javascript framework and embeddable maps is a different product than their maps.google.com, which seems to be higher quality both in the data and the rendering/features. The one they offer to embed on your site appears to be a much older version (for instance it doesn't support smooth zooming or 512x512 tiles). There are also TOS restrictions with what you can do with their javascript framework and widgets/API's, for instance you generally can't use other data providers or features from other mapping/GIS services on the same page.
Also if it really is such a big part of your product, I don't really think $80 per day (for 15k unique users) as an operational cost is all that much honestly. And if you have a single page app, Google only charges for the first load anyways. They may have greatly increased the prices, but it does reflect the value they are providing and the tone taken in the article comes off as freeloading and ignorant of the effort level and value of providing such a service.
People also need to note that Google's javascript framework and embeddable maps is a different product than their maps.google.com, which seems to be higher quality both in the data and the rendering/features. The one they offer to embed on your site appears to be a much older version (for instance it doesn't support smooth zooming or 512x512 tiles). There are also TOS restrictions with what you can do with their javascript framework and widgets/API's, for instance you generally can't use other data providers or features from other mapping/GIS services on the same page.