Good news and bad news: on July 17, 2018 Google’s new pricing structure kicks in for the use of Maps, Routes, and Places. Good news is it will go a long way toward ironing out a haphazard collection of existing APIs. Bad news is you’ll be required to create an account and a billing profile in order to use them.
While most users will fall within the pricing plan’s free use parameters, you’ll still need to keep a credit card on file and be pay if your usage goes over the free plan caps. If maintaining one more billing account and monitoring API usage seems like a negative return on investment for your time, then you may be better off not using those features.
In order to help figure out if you really need to use integrated maps, routes, and places functionality or if simply linking out to Google directions is a better option, I published an article at ArtsHacker yesterday with some tips on how to go about that process.
