Google Places API Pricing Calculator

How Google Places API Pricing Works in 2026

Google Places API pricing is pay-as-you-go, quoted per 1,000 billable events, and split into SKUs — one for each kind of request at each data tier. A Text Search that returns names and addresses is one SKU; the same Text Search returning phone numbers is another, at a different price. Your monthly bill is the sum of every SKU you touched.

Since 1 March 2025 there is no shared allowance. Google replaced the old $200 monthly credit with a free monthly threshold on each Core Services SKU: 10,000 calls for Essentials SKUs, 5,000 for Pro and 1,000 for Enterprise. The allowance on one SKU cannot be spent on another, which is why two apps with the same total spend can now get very different invoices.

Above the free cap, prices step down with volume. The first band runs to 100,000 calls a month, then 500,000, 1,000,000 and 5,000,000, and the per-1,000 rate drops at each step — Text Search Enterprise goes from $35 to $28, $21, $10.50 and finally $2.63. The calculator above applies those bands for you, which is the part most back-of-envelope estimates get wrong.

Is the Google Places API Free?

Up to the free caps, yes, and for a lot of small projects the bill really is zero. A store locator doing 8,000 Autocomplete requests and 4,000 Place Details Essentials lookups a month pays nothing. A side project that needs a few hundred businesses with phone numbers fits inside the 1,000 free Enterprise calls.

You still need a billing account with a card attached before the API will answer at all, and the free allowance is per billing account, not per project. Spinning up a second project under the same account does not give you a second 1,000 calls.

Two SKUs are free without limit: Text Search Essentials and Place Details Essentials when you request IDs only. If all you need is the Place ID — to store as a key and refresh later — ask for nothing else and you will never be billed for it. Our Place ID finder gets the same identifier from a Maps URL without an API key at all.

Why Your Field Mask Sets Your Places API Cost

Places API (New) makes you list the fields you want in a field mask, and bills the whole request at the tier of the most expensive field in it. This is the single biggest lever in Google Places API pricing, and the easiest one to pull by accident.

Name, address, coordinates, category and Maps link are Pro fields. Phone number, website, star rating, review count and opening hours are Enterprise fields. Reviews themselves are Enterprise + Atmosphere. Add nationalPhoneNumber to a Text Search that was costing $32 per 1,000 and it now costs $35 — and, more importantly, your free allowance drops from 5,000 calls to 1,000.

The common mistake is a field mask of * during development that never gets narrowed before launch. Wildcard masks pull every field, so every request is billed as Enterprise + Atmosphere, the top tier. Audit the mask before you audit anything else.

What a Business List Really Costs on the Places API

Most people searching for Google Places API pricing are not building a store locator. They want a list: every dentist in Phoenix, every roofer in Texas, with a phone number and a website for each. That is a Text Search workload, and it behaves differently from the per-call maths in Google Places API pricing tables.

Text Search returns at most 20 places per page and stops at 60 per query. To cover a whole city you run many narrower queries — by neighbourhood, by ZIP code, by sub-category — and they overlap. The same business shows up in “dentist Scottsdale” and “dentist 85251”, and you pay for it both times. The overlap slider in the lead list mode exists for exactly this; 25% is a realistic starting point for a city-wide sweep.

Run the numbers and the result is not what a glance at Google Places API pricing suggests. A 10,000-business list needs about 667 requests, which sits inside the 1,000 free Enterprise calls: the Places API cost is zero. At 100,000 businesses a month it is around $198, and at a million around $2,300. For one-off lists the Places API is cheap. Cost is rarely the thing that stops a lead-generation project — the next section is.

What Google Places API Pricing Pages Leave Out: The Terms

The Google Maps Platform Terms of Service, section 3.2.3(a), say a customer “will not export, extract, or otherwise scrape Google Maps Content for use outside the Services”, and list as an example that you will not “copy and save business names, addresses, or user reviews”. The Places API section of the service-specific terms allows caching latitude and longitude for up to 30 days and forbids showing results on a non-Google map. Place IDs are the documented exception and can be stored indefinitely.

In plain terms, the API is licensed for showing places inside your app, next to a Google map, at the moment a user needs them. Pulling 10,000 dentists into a spreadsheet for a cold email campaign is the use case the terms single out. Whatever the calculator says the API costs, that workflow is not what you are paying for.

There is also a data gap. The Places API has no email field at any tier, and no social profiles. For outreach, those are usually the columns that matter most. Our guide on whether scraping Google Maps is legal covers the other side of this question in detail.

Google Places API Pricing: Subscriptions vs Pay-As-You-Go

Google also sells flat monthly subscriptions that pool calls across Maps, Routes and Places: Starter at $100 for 50,000 combined calls, Essentials at $275 for 100,000, and Pro at $1,200 for 250,000. Usage above the plan is billed at pay-as-you-go rates.

A subscription only helps if your traffic is steady and spread across the SKUs it includes. Check the plan's SKU list before switching: the Starter plan covers Pro Places SKUs, so a workload that needs phone numbers or websites can still fall outside it. For spiky or Enterprise-heavy usage, pay-as-you-go with good field masks is usually cheaper.

How to Lower Your Google Places API Cost

Most of a Google Places API pricing bill comes from decisions you control in code. These five matter most:

• Narrow the field mask. Request Pro fields in the search, then fetch Enterprise fields with Place Details only for the results a user actually opens.
• Use session tokens with Autocomplete. A session that ends in a Place Details call is billed for the Details call only; the keystrokes are free.
• Store Place IDs, not place data. IDs can be kept indefinitely and refreshed through the free IDs-only SKUs.
• Set quotas in the Cloud console. A daily cap per API turns a runaway loop into an error instead of an invoice.
• Pick the right tool for bulk lists. If the goal is a spreadsheet of businesses, the API is the wrong tool for the reasons above; a Google Maps scraper API is built for that job.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does the Google Places API cost per request?

Between about $0.003 and $0.04 per call at list price, depending on the SKU. Autocomplete is $2.83 per 1,000; Place Details Essentials is $5 per 1,000; Text Search Enterprise is $35 per 1,000; Text Search with Atmosphere fields is $40 per 1,000. Rates fall with volume above 100,000 calls a month.

Does Google still give a $200 monthly credit?

No. It was replaced on 1 March 2025 by per-SKU free usage. Many articles and AI answers still quote the $200 figure; any Google Places API pricing estimate built on it will be wrong for workloads concentrated on one SKU.

Does the Google Places API return email addresses?

No. There is no email field in Places API (New) or the legacy API. Getting emails means visiting each business website and extracting them, which is what our Google Maps email extractor does alongside the listing data.

How many results does a Places API Text Search return?

Up to 20 per page and 60 per query across three pages. Each page is a separate billable request, so a full 60-result query costs three calls.

Is this the same as a Google Maps API pricing calculator?

This Google Places API pricing calculator covers the Places side of Google Maps Platform — search, details, autocomplete, photos — plus Geocoding. Map loads and Routes are priced separately and are not included here. For how scraper pricing compares across vendors, see our Google Maps scraper pricing comparison.