January 23, 2019
Google Maps Platform introduces a suite of new enhancements to the Places API
Whether you are a Google Maps Platform customer already or a Premium Plan Customer, you can customize and decide what data is retrieved from the Places APIs. To optimize data calls, you should evaluate your Places API requests and consider updating Places Details request with the fields parameter to avoid unnecessary billing charges.
Google Maps Platform introduces a range of new Places APIs, and these are separated into three price points. For some usage cases, not all of the API data is needed, so there might be opportunities to reduce Places cost. This possibility of reducing costs results from these changes to the Google pricing model.
What has changed?
You can see in these two tables below the changes applied to the new Google Maps Platform model:
Premium Plan
Outgoing pricing model
Places Details requests returned all of the available data associated with the specified place.
Google Maps Platform
New pricing model
Places Details requests allow customizable use of fields parameters to limit the response to only the data fields that are specified.
In order to optimise costs, please consider your use case to identify the business value of providing more or less data to end users. Consider updating Places Details request calls with the fields parameter to limit the response and return only the data fields needed.
Priority Actions Review List
Places data SKUs are now reported (Basic Data, Contact Data, Atmosphere Data). Each group contains specific places information and the pricing is based on the entire group of information (i.e. not separate items).
What to do?
- Add fields parameter or replace calls that return all available Place data fields by default, if not needed.
- Consider returning only the Basic details data elements with the initial call, and provideoptional links to the high-value contact and atmosphere data to give customers the option to select the additional data is needed.