The hidden costs of the Google Maps API

Many times we promote the awesome benefits of Google. Why, they give so many things for free! It has become such a groundbreaking company when it comes to its services! You can even visit the Google campus and use many of the company perks for free whether it be riding one of the Google bicycles or using their soccer field. It does come as a surprise to many that when it comes to developing applications, that using some of the APIs given by Google may actually end up accruing a cost.

True to its Google nature we can see in the following image that Google does allow free access to Google Maps through its API. A great benefit to beginning Android products who want to see some tangible implementations take effect. When a particular map is loaded, there is an internal counter in the API that logs how many times a map is loaded. For small apps, Google generally absorbs any cost and it is free to use. However, when the map load count reaches a high count, a daily charge may be inflicted.

 Img. 1 Google Maps API cost per day

 Fig. 1 The growing pain of costs for daily map loads in an app using the API

Source: Svennerberg, G. 2010, Pak, J.

At the beginning stages of the Santa Clara Valley Wine App, there will be an estimated traffic that will most likely fall under the free categories. However, once the app is put onto the Google Play Store, a daily fee may begin to be charged unbeknownst to the ill-advised product owner.

A possible problem would be the map is loaded each time a winery is visited through the app. Now this could be potentially disastrous as we would want to minimize the amount of map loads per user. An excellent solution would be to not overload a map with markers but to utilize the GPS coordinates of a set of wineries to prevent the map from being reloaded constantly. According to Svennerberg who wrote about the Google Maps API, he said, "overloading a map with markers may hurt more than help." (Svennerberg, 2015).

The ultimate goal of an app though is to generate revenue. To generate revenue, we need to see many users access the app. More users using the app and we will have more and more map loads. As the revenue increases, so will the cost of using the Google Maps API. A growing pain but a necessary pain nonetheless. As developers continue to utilize different APIs, it will be integral in the software development to keep a track of the costs.

FAQ. (n.d.). Retrieved October 15, 2015.  https://developers.google.com/maps/faq?hl=en.
   Svennerberg, G. (2010). Beginning Google Maps API 3. New York: Apress.