I just received this little email from the Google Maps Platform team, mentioning major upcoming changes to the Google Maps platform, which a lot of us use for our mapping platform of choice for Gigatrees, The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding, webtrees, as well as blogs.
Note: This affects those of us who are embedding Google Maps in our websites, whether it be the afore-mentioned online genealogy programs, or our personal blogs. If you are just using Google Maps to look things up, it does not affect you.
Some of us use the services enough that we have to pay a small fee (https://mapsplatform.google.com/pricing/) while others of us aren’t hitting the minimum threshold of $200 worth of charges (that doesn’t mean we pay $200 USD, it means we have that amount of credit every month).
We have some time before the changes kick in:
These changes include: pricing discounts, monthly credit, and services transitioning to Legacy status, which will go into effect on March 1, 2025.
Service Level Changes:
To make it easier for you, we are streamlining our offerings into clear categories — Essentials, Pro, and Enterprise. You can continue to select individual capabilities across these categories to find the perfect fit based on the level of customization that you need.
Monthly Credit Charges:
To help you identify, evaluate, and test our services, we are modifying the current USD $200 monthly recurring credit by offering a free* monthly usage threshold for each Core Services SKU.
This free usage enables you to experiment and build with our APIs and SDKs without any upfront cost. The free usage threshold varies for each category, as shown in the table below. Please refer to the FAQ below to determine which category of each Core Services SKU.
Free monthly billable events for most Core Services’ SKUs
- Essentials – 10,000
- Pro – 5,000
- Enterprise – 1,000
*Free usage refers to monthly billable events available at no cost
Effective March 1, 2025, you will no longer be able to enable Places API, Directions API, and Distance Matrix API (legacy services). Existing customers already using these services may continue to use these services with no disruptions. The expanded automatic volume discounts will not be available for the legacy services.
We strongly encourage customers to use Places API (New) instead of Places API, and Routes API instead of Directions and Distance Matrix API, which provide enhanced features, improved quality, and expanded automatic volume discounts.
No action is required from you. Expanded automatic volume discounts and monthly credit changes will be reflected on the next billing cycle after March 1, 2025.
I left out a few changes that get into the millions of events ranges, which most of us will not be dealing with (and could not afford), but you can find all of the information below:
Full FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions: