Google Places API Pricing 2026: Every SKU Priced

A Google Places Text Search that returns a business website and phone number is billed at $35.00 per 1,000 requests. Drop those two fields from the field mask and the identical query is billed at $32.00 per 1,000, with five times the free monthly allowance. That is the real shape of Google Places API pricing in 2026: your rate is not set by how many results you get back, it is set by the single most expensive field you asked for, and the pricing page does not tell you which field that is.

The biz collect team priced every Places SKU off Google's own core services pricing list on 28 August 2026, then billed one concrete job line by line: every dental clinic in Austin, Texas. Every Google figure below is quoted from a Google page with the date we read it, because Google replaced the $200 monthly credit on 1 March 2025 and most pre-2025 writing about Places API cost is now simply wrong.

How much does the Google Places API cost?

The Google Places API costs between $0 and $40.00 per 1,000 requests depending on which SKU your request lands in, and every SKU carries a free monthly allowance of 1,000 to 10,000 calls that resets each month. There is no per-seat fee, no minimum spend and no charge for the API key itself: you pay per request, and the Google Places API price for that request is decided by the fields you list in the mandatory field mask.

Here is the table that answers most of the traffic on this query. All figures are USD per 1,000 requests at the 0 to 100,000 monthly volume tier.

Source: Google Maps Platform core services pricing list, read 28 August 2026. Google revises this list; check the live page before you budget.

Two implications a developer can act on immediately. First, the cheapest useful search in the whole catalog is free: Text Search Essentials (IDs Only) has a $0 rate and an unlimited free cap, so discovery costs nothing as long as you only want identifiers. Second, the jump from Pro to Enterprise is not the $3.00 per 1,000 it looks like. It is $3.00 plus the loss of 4,000 free calls a month, and at low volume that second part is the entire bill.

The three price categories that set your rate

Google Maps Platform sorts every Places field into three price categories, plus an Atmosphere modifier that sits on top of Enterprise. This taxonomy, not the endpoint you call, is what determines your invoice. These are the field lists as published on Google's Places API data fields page (read 28 August 2026, page last updated 2026-08-25):

• Essentials (IDs Only). id, name, attributions, photos. Free, unlimited, and the only tier with no cap at all.
• Essentials. formattedAddress, shortFormattedAddress, addressComponents, postalAddress, location, viewport, plusCode, types. Street address and coordinates.
• Pro. displayName, businessStatus, primaryType, primaryTypeDisplayName, googleMapsUri, googleMapsLinks, timeZone, utcOffsetMinutes, openingDate, entrances, containingPlaces. The identity and classification layer.
• Enterprise. websiteUri, nationalPhoneNumber, internationalPhoneNumber, regularOpeningHours, currentOpeningHours, rating, userRatingCount, priceLevel, priceRange. Everything you would actually contact a business with.
• Enterprise + Atmosphere. Everything in Enterprise plus reviews, reviewSummary, editorialSummary, generativeSummary, parkingOptions, accessibilityOptions, outdoorSeating, servesBreakfast and the rest of the amenity block.

The billing rule is stated plainly on Google's Places API Usage and Billing page (read 28 August 2026): "You are then billed at the highest SKU applicable to your request. That means if you select fields in both the Essentials and the Pro SKUs, you are billed based on the Pro SKU."

That single sentence is the mechanism behind most surprise bills. websiteUri is one string. Adding it to an otherwise Pro-tier field mask reprices every request in the job and cuts your free allowance from 5,000 to 1,000. There is no partial billing and no way to pay Pro rates for the Pro fields and Enterprise rates for the one Enterprise field.

Is the Google Places API free to use?

No, the Google Places API is not free, but every paid SKU has a free monthly allowance that resets on the first of the month, and small projects genuinely never pay. Google replaced the old $200 monthly recurring credit on 1 March 2025 with a per-SKU free usage threshold, documented on the Maps Platform billing FAQ (read 28 August 2026).

Source: Maps Platform billing FAQ and the core services pricing list, both read 28 August 2026.

Three things about the Google Places API free tier that catch people out. The allowance is per SKU, not per project, so a job that hits Text Search Enterprise and Place Details Enterprise draws on two separate 1,000-call pools. It is per calendar month and does not roll over. And the old $200 credit is gone, so a project that used to run free under the credit can now bill from the 1,001st Enterprise call onward.

Google Maps Platform also sells optional fixed-fee subscriptions as an alternative to pay-as-you-go, listed on the subscriptions page (read 28 August 2026): Starter at $100 per month for 50,000 calls, Essentials at $275 per month for 100,000 calls, and Pro at $1,200 per month for 250,000 calls, with an Enterprise plan priced on request. Calls above your plan's limit are charged at standard pay-as-you-go prices. Subscriptions are worth modeling only once your pay-as-you-go bill is stable and predictable, because a plan you underuse is money burned.

Is a Google Places API key free?

Yes. Creating an API key for Google Places costs nothing, and there is no recurring charge for holding one; you are billed only for the requests the key makes. What you cannot skip is the billing account: Google's Places API key setup guide (read 28 August 2026) states that "Google Maps Platform products require API keys for authentication and billing purposes, linking your project and billing account to the API."

So the honest answers to the questions people actually type:

• How much is a Google Places API key? $0. The key is an identifier. The cost is per request against it.
• How to get a Google Places API key for free? Create a Google Cloud project, attach a Cloud Billing account, enable the Places API, and mint a key in the console. Keeping it free means staying inside the per-SKU monthly caps above.
• Do I need to pay for a Google API? Only when your usage of a given SKU passes that SKU's free monthly threshold. Under it, the invoice is $0.
• Which Google API is free? Within Maps Platform, the no-cost SKUs are the ones with unlimited free caps: Text Search Essentials (IDs Only), Place Details Essentials (IDs Only) and Autocomplete Session Usage, all listed at $0 on the core services pricing list.

One key covers everything you enable on the project, so a single Google API key for Places, Geocoding and the Maps SDKs is normal. The billing is still per SKU, which means a shared key makes the console's SKU breakdown the only place you can see where the money went.

Google strongly recommends restricting an API key to the specific APIs it needs. An unrestricted key that leaks into a client bundle is billed to you at the same rates as your own traffic, and the Enterprise SKUs are the ones an attacker's script will hit hardest.

Places API pricing by SKU

Google Maps API pricing is published as one core services list covering every product, and the Places API (New) pricing inside it is a per-SKU ladder with automatic volume discounts that now scale to 5,000,000+ monthly billable events, up from the 100,000+ threshold that applied before March 2025. Every figure in the three tables below is USD per 1,000 requests, read off the core services pricing list on 28 August 2026.

Essentials SKUs (10,000 free per SKU per month)

Pro SKUs (5,000 free per SKU per month)

Enterprise SKUs (1,000 free per SKU per month)

The full ladder for Text Search Enterprise runs $35.00 for the first 100,000 requests, $28.00 from 100,000 to 500,000, $21.00 from 500,000 to 1,000,000, $10.50 from 1,000,000 to 5,000,000, and $2.63 above 5,000,000. The discount is real and it is automatic, but it only starts to bite at volumes most local-data projects never reach. If your monthly Places spend is three figures, you are paying the top of the ladder on every single call.

The costs that are not on the pricing page

The rate card is honest and complete. What it does not tell you is how many requests a given outcome actually takes, and that multiplier is where the surprise lives. Six drivers, in the order they usually bite:

Sources: Places API Usage and Billing, Text Search (New) and Nearby Search (New), all read 28 August 2026.

The 60-result ceiling deserves its own paragraph because it is the one nobody prices in. If you are building a dataset rather than a search box, you are not making one request per city, you are making one request per sub-area per page. A city with 600 matching businesses needs the search area subdivided into enough tiles that no tile exceeds 60 results, then three paginated requests per tile, then deduplication by place ID on your side. That is roughly 70 billed requests to answer what felt like one question, and the tiles overlap, so a meaningful share of those requests return places you already have.

On the caching side: what you may store, for how long, and what has to be re-requested is set by Google's Maps Platform terms rather than by the pricing page. We walk through those documents clause by clause, with links, in Google Places API terms: scraping, storage and cache rules. The cost consequence is the only part that belongs here, and it is simple: if a field cannot be warehoused, every refresh cycle pays the full request price again.

Worked example: every dental clinic in Austin

Here is one concrete job priced end to end. Target: every dental clinic within a 20 km radius of Austin, Texas, with name, address, phone, website, opening hours and rating. Assume the area holds roughly 600 matching businesses and that the grid resolves to 24 tiles. Substitute your own city, vertical and tile count into the same arithmetic.

Step 1: count the requests. One Text Search returns 20 results per page and a hard maximum of 60 across all pages, so 600 businesses cannot come from one query. Twenty-four tiles at three pages each is 72 Text Search requests.

Step 2: find your SKU. The mask needs websiteUri, nationalPhoneNumber, regularOpeningHours, rating and userRatingCount. All five are Enterprise fields, so all 72 requests bill as Text Search Enterprise at $35.00 per 1,000.

Step 3: apply the free cap. Enterprise SKUs carry 1,000 free calls per month. 72 is well inside it, so the honest answer for one city, once, is $0.00. Google is free at this scale and any page telling you otherwise is selling something.

Step 4: scale it. Run the same grid across 50 metros once a month and you make 3,600 requests. Subtract the 1,000 free and you bill 2,600 at $0.035 each: $91.00 per month.

Step 5: price the five fields. Drop websiteUri, nationalPhoneNumber, regularOpeningHours, rating and userRatingCount from the mask and those same 3,600 requests bill as Text Search Pro, which has a 5,000 free monthly cap. The bill becomes $0.00. Those five fields cost $91.00 a month, and $0 of that appears on the pricing page as a line item.

Step 6: watch it stop being linear. Move to 200 metros refreshed weekly: 200 metros x 24 tiles x 3 pages x 4 runs = 57,600 requests a month. Minus the 1,000 free, 56,600 bill at $0.035 for $1,981.00 per month, still inside the first volume tier. Add the reviews field and every request moves to Enterprise + Atmosphere at $0.040, taking the same job to $2,264.00 per month. One field, $283.00.

Step 7: check the grid tax. In theory 30,000 unique places cost 1,500 batched requests, of which 500 are billable, or $17.50. In practice step 4 charged $91.00 for the same 30,000 places. That five-fold gap is tile overlap and short pages, and it is the difference between what a pricing calculator predicts and what arrives.

There is a second route worth knowing. Text Search Essentials (IDs Only) is $0 with an unlimited cap, so you can discover place IDs for free and then call Place Details Enterprise at $20.00 per 1,000 only for the places you care about. For 30,000 places that is 29,000 billable details after the free 1,000, or $580.00, so it loses badly on bulk. It wins decisively when you already hold place IDs and need fresh details on a handful of them.

The same job on biz collect

biz collect charges credits, not per-SKU rates. The formula is published in the OpenAPI 3.1 spec: credits_charged = tile_count x result_pages x unique keyword queries x 20. The Austin job is 24 x 3 x 1 x 20 = 1,440 credits.

Two honest notes on that table. At one city a month, Google costs nothing and we cost credits, so if all you need is the Places fields, call Google directly. At 50 metros a month the picture does not flip either: that job is 72,000 credits, more than the Business plan's 30,000, so it lands on top-ups while Google bills $91.00. What the credits buy is the grid, the dedupe, the website crawl and the emails, not a cheaper copy of Google's data. If your job stops at the Places fields, Google is the better tool and we would rather say so than dress up the arithmetic.

The equivalent single call, synchronous so an agent gets results inline:

# Your API base URL and key are both shown in the docs at /docs
BIZ_API="https://kindly-lyrebird-376.convex.site/api/v1"

curl -X POST "$BIZ_API/search" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer biz_live_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8" \
  -d '{
    "location": "Austin, Texas",
    "keywords": ["dental clinic"],
    "radius_km": 20,
    "result_pages": 3,
    "coverage": "exhaustive",
    "max_credits": 1500,
    "scrape_emails": true,
    "wait": true,
    "wait_timeout_seconds": 540
  }'

{
  "job_id": "j_a91k...",
  "status": "completed",
  "results_count": 613,
  "tile_count": 24,
  "coverage_truncated": false,
  "wait_timed_out": false,
  "businesses": [
    {
      "name": "Example Dental Clinic",
      "address": "...",
      "phone": "+1 512 ...",
      "website": "https://...",
      "emails": ["hello@..."],
      "rating": 4.8,
      "user_rating_count": 214
    }
  ]
}

max_credits is the spend cap: if the full grid would cost more, the tile list is truncated to the most central tiles and the job comes back flagged coverage_truncated: true rather than quietly billing you more than you agreed to. The counts above are placeholders for the shape of the response, not a coverage claim; how many businesses a city returns and how many of them publish an email on their own site varies by city and vertical.

What no Places SKU returns: contact emails

There is no email field in the Places API at any price tier. Not in Essentials, not in Pro, not in Enterprise, not in Enterprise + Atmosphere. The data fields reference (read 28 August 2026) lists websiteUri, nationalPhoneNumber and internationalPhoneNumber under Enterprise, and that is the end of the contact surface.

This is a capability boundary, not a quality problem. The Google Maps Places API is built to power maps, place pickers and store locators inside a product, and it is very good at that: fresh, authoritative, globally consistent, well documented, with an honest rate card. Outbound contact data was never in scope. Paying more does not unlock it, and no combination of field masks produces it.

So if your project needs to email these businesses, the invoice above is only the first line of your real budget. The second line is the crawler: fetching each websiteUri, parsing contact and imprint pages, handling JavaScript-only sites, deduplicating addresses, and keeping all of it alive as those sites change. That work does not appear on any Google pricing page because Google is not doing it. We break the mechanics down in how to find business email addresses and the extraction detail in extract emails from any website.

For the wider decision, which of the Places API, a Google Maps scraper and a business data API is right for your use case, the full three-way comparison lives in Google Places API vs scrapers vs business data APIs. If you are specifically weighing a scraper, Google Places scraper: extract business data covers the extraction path. If you are shopping for a Google Places API alternative that returns JSON directly, the business data API guide compares eleven providers on what each actually returns, and free business leads API covers what $0 buys you across them.

Seven levers that cut a Places API bill

Every lever below moves a number in the tables above. They are ordered by how much they typically save.

1. Audit the field mask first. Removing one Enterprise field from a Pro-tier mask saves $3.00 per 1,000 and restores 4,000 free calls a month. This is the single highest-leverage change and it usually takes ten minutes.
2. Never request reviews speculatively. It pulls the whole job into Enterprise + Atmosphere at $40.00 per 1,000, a 14% premium over the $35.00 Enterprise rate, on every request in the job rather than only the ones whose reviews you read.
3. Use IDs-only discovery when you already know what you want. Text Search Essentials (IDs Only) is $0 with an unlimited cap. Pair it with Place Details only for the places that survive your filter.
4. Split the mask across two calls when the split is cheap. Place Details Essentials is $5.00 per 1,000 with 10,000 free; Place Details Enterprise is $20.00 with 1,000 free. If most records only need an address, do not pay Enterprise rates for all of them.
5. Stop paginating early. Each nextPageToken page is a separate billed request at the full SKU rate. If your filter discards everything below rank 20, pages two and three are two thirds of that query's cost spent on rows you throw away.
6. Size the grid to the data, not to the map. Tiles that return fewer than 20 results are the most expensive requests in the job on a cost-per-unique-business basis. Subdivide dense areas, not empty ones.
7. Watch the free caps as a design constraint, not a discount. At 1,000 free Enterprise calls a month, the first meaningful production job exhausts the allowance. Model your bill from request 1,001, not from request 1.

None of these change the fundamental structure: Google Maps Platform pricing is per request, the request price is set by your most expensive field, and the request count is set by the 60-result ceiling. Everything else is optimization inside those three facts.

The bottom line on Places API pricing

Three decisions drive the entire invoice. Which fields you ask for, because the highest category in your mask prices the whole request and sets your free allowance. How many requests one answer costs, because the 60-result ceiling turns a city into dozens of tiles and three pages each. How often you refresh, because Google's terms restrict warehousing Places content, so a monthly rebuild pays the same bill every month. Get those three right and the Google Maps Platform pricing page becomes predictable rather than alarming.

When the Places API is the right tool, it is decisively the right tool, and at small volume it is free. Where it stops is contact data: no SKU returns an email address, so a project that needs to reach these businesses still has a crawler to build and maintain. That is the gap biz collect fills. One call turns a city plus keywords into structured JSON with name, address, phone, website, emails, socials, hours and ratings, async with a synchronous wait: true mode, an OpenAPI 3.1 spec and webhooks, at 20 credits per Google Places result page. New accounts get 200 signup credits with no credit card, which is ten result pages to test the shape of the data before you commit to anything.

Try it with one API call. Read the OpenAPI spec, then ship.