They have different billing structure for enterprise stuffs, so!? businesses can...

watty · on Oct 3, 2012

My point was that it's not "mostly free", any serious business or website with a decent amount of traffic will be paying $$.

taligent · on Oct 3, 2012

And if you are building a startup that wants to compete in these markets ?

The definition of enterprise is pretty arbitrary these days.

imechura · on Oct 3, 2012

From my understanding you only get charged when accessing the map API server side. If you use the JS API in the client's browser the requests don't count against your quota. Google even suggests that your script can pass the information back to your server to be stored. Therefore, you can scale your user base without incurring high costs.

untog · on Oct 3, 2012

That's not true. The number of client API loads are counted, but the number of map tiles loaded by that client is not. i.e. you are charged per page load, irrespective of the user activity on that page.

hayksaakian · on Oct 3, 2012

Given for example the geocoding API, which is js based and requires no API key, I don't see how they would know who to charge.

untog · on Oct 4, 2012

As stated by the docs:

Use of the Google Geocoding API is subject to a query limit of 2,500 geolocation requests per day

if you're using the server endpoint, which perhaps checks what server the request is coming from- I have no idea. The JS, client-side version definitely requires a key.