Free Google Maps API (2026): What's Free, What's Near-Free

Search for “free Google Maps API” and two questions come back mixed together. One is about Google’s own Maps Platform: how many map loads and place lookups cost nothing. The other is about business data: can you pull listings, phone numbers and reviews in bulk without paying?

The first answer is “partly”. The second is “not at any size, and not before you read Google’s terms”. On 23 October 2026 we read the official pages for Google, the main free and open-data sources and seven paid Maps data APIs, then worked out what each costs per place.

The options at a glance

First the official route, then open sources, then hosted Maps data APIs. “Per 1,000” means calls, searches or records as each vendor defines them.

Checked 2026-10-23. Sources are linked in each section below.

Two questions with one name

“Google Maps API” covers products with little in common. Some draw a map, some turn an address into coordinates, and others return business data: a place’s name, phone, website, rating, hours and reviews.

For a store locator or a delivery app, Google’s free allowance is a real saving. For a list of every dentist in a city, a local rank history or a review feed, you are asking the second question. Free runs out quickly there, and Google’s terms matter most.

One boundary: Serpent’s Maps API is a data API. Its page says it does not render maps, give directions, geocode or provide autocomplete widgets.

Google’s own free allowance in 2026

The old $200 monthly credit is gone. Google’s March 2025 page says it “replaced the USD $200 monthly recurring credit with a free monthly usage threshold for each Core Services SKU”. Free usage is now counted per product and does not pool.

The pricing page (“Last updated 2026-10-21 UTC”) sets the cap by tier. These are the lines that matter, with the first paid price per 1,000 events:

Read on Google’s pricing page, 2026-10-23. Prices fall in volume tiers above 100,000 events a month.

For map display and geocoding this is generous: a small site can stay at zero.

The catch for business data

The free place calls return little. Google’s Text Search documentation lists which fields trigger which tier. The unlimited “IDs Only” tier returns the place ID. Pro adds name, address, coordinates and types. Enterprise adds rating, rating count, website, phone numbers and opening hours. Reviews sit in a fourth tier, Enterprise + Atmosphere.

So the first tier that returns a phone and a website costs $35.00 per 1,000 requests after 1,000 free a month. A request returns up to 20 places, and Text Search “returns a maximum of 60 results across all pages, although this limit is subject to change”. Reviews are capped too: the Place reference says “a maximum of 5 reviews can be returned”.

A worked example, by our arithmetic. Phone, website and rating for 100,000 places is 5,000 requests. After 1,000 free, 4,000 are billed at $35.00 per 1,000: $140. For 1,000,000 places it is 50,000 requests, so $1,715. The free allowance covers up to about 20,000 places a month, if every request returns 20.

Can you store Google’s place data?

Most “free API” guides skip this. Google’s Maps Platform terms restrict storing and exporting place data, so read them and ask your own counsel before you build a stored data set. We are not lawyers.

Hosted Maps data APIs are a different contract from Google’s, and we offer no view on how Google’s terms or any other law applies to your use of one. Business contact details can also be personal data in some places. Ask your own counsel before building a product on any of them.

Free open alternatives are different products

Open data is real and free, but it is not a free copy of Google Maps. None of it returns Google’s ranking, reviews or popular times, and coverage depends on who has mapped your area. Sample your own region first.

• OpenStreetMap Nominatim is a geocoder, not a business directory. Its usage policy sets “an absolute maximum of 1 request per second”, requires attribution under the share-alike ODbL licence, and forbids “systematic queries” such as “downloading all POIs in an area”. It also “may change without notice”.
• Overpass API queries OpenStreetMap map data. The OpenStreetMap wiki calls its public servers “designed for small projects” and says “Commercial use should use self-hosted or paid Overpass servers.”
• Foursquare Places API is a real pay-as-you-go API. Its pricing page shows Pro endpoints free for “0 – 500 Calls”, then $15.00 per 1,000 up to 100,000 calls. The same page also says “up to 10,000 free calls on Pro endpoints”; we could not tell which applies.
• Foursquare Open Source Places is a download: “100mm+ global places of interest” with 22 core attributes, updated monthly and available for commercial use under Apache 2.0, per Foursquare. You host it; it is not a live search.
• Open-source Maps scrapers. The most visible one on GitHub is MIT licensed with “no hidden costs or usage limits”. The licence is free; running it is not. You operate it, repair it when Google changes its pages, and answer for your use under the terms above.

What free really costs you

Free suits a prototype. For anything customers depend on, it hides five costs.

1. IDs, not businesses. Google’s unlimited tiers return identifiers. Phone and website start in Enterprise.
2. Storage rules. Google’s Maps Platform terms restrict storing and exporting place data, so read them before you plan a stored list or rank history.
3. Result ceilings. 60 results a query and 5 reviews a place at Google; one request a second at Nominatim.
4. Moving quotas. Google replaced its $200 credit in March 2025, Foursquare prints two free amounts and Nominatim can change its policy without notice.
5. Your time. A scraper or Overpass pipeline is yours to host and fix, and none of the free pages we read promise support.

A worked example. An agency wants phone, website and rating for 10,000 businesses across 200 cities each month. Google’s free allowance would cover the 500 requests. A hosted Maps data API prices the same 10,000 places from $7.50 to $40 a month on the figures below.

Near-free Maps data APIs, one by one

“Near-free” means a few dollars or less per 1,000 places, or a small monthly plan, plus a free allowance. Maps calls return different numbers of places, so we convert every price to cost per 1,000 places.

Serpent

• Price: pay per call. Quick is $0.015 at the Default tier and returns up to 20 fully enriched places: $0.75 per 1,000 places. A one-time $100 deposit moves you to $0.0135 (Growth) and $500 to $0.0105 (Scale; Enterprise at $1,000 is the same). Place details are $0.0015 a call, reviews $0.003 for up to 20. The minimum first deposit is $10 and is spendable balance. One charge per call, no subscription, and deposited credits do not expire (see pricing).
• Free tier: 10 free calls on signup, shared across services and usable on all five Maps products, plus one free demo run a day on the Google Maps API page.
• What you get: GET /api/maps/search/quick (20 places, paged with start up to 100), /api/maps/search (up to 100 ranked places; detail sets how many get a full record), /api/maps/place and /api/maps/reviews. Every place has one shape, including phone, website, rating, opening hours, popular times, amenities and whether the listing is claimed. Reviews carry the reviewer and the owner’s reply.
• List mode: detail=0 returns the ranked list with nothing enriched, at $0.0001 per call for up to 20 places or $0.0005 for up to 100: $0.005 per 1,000 places at Default. The reference says these core records carry name, address, coordinates, rating, review count, phone and website, and that a null there means “unknown”, not “absent”.
• Watch-outs: a response can hold fewer places than you asked for; it then carries counts, a delivery block and meta.partial, and is still billed. A deep call is capped at detail=30, and detail 21 to 100 is a flat $0.075 a call, five times the $0.015 band at 20. Deeper runs need an async route that is currently unavailable.
• Where others beat us: DataForSEO and Scrapingdog print lower per-place rates; Outscraper, Bright Data and Apify give bigger free allowances.

DataForSEO

• Price: per SERP of up to 100 listings: $0.0006 in the Standard queue ($0.60 per 1,000), $0.0012 in Priority, $0.002 in Live. That is as little as $0.006 per 1,000 places if every SERP is full; the page notes Maps results follow Google’s “search this area” behaviour, so some hold fewer.
• Free tier and minimum: a “Try for free” link with no amount printed. Its pricing FAQ sets a $50 minimum top-up with no expiry.
• Watch-outs: Standard averages about 5 minutes (target 45), Priority about a minute, Live about 6 seconds.

Scrapingdog

• Price: a Maps request is 5 credits. Lite is $40 a month for 200,000 credits ($1.00 per 1,000 requests), Standard $90 for 1,000,000 ($0.45). Pages step by 20, so Lite is about $0.05 per 1,000 places.
• Free tier: 100 credits, or 20 Maps requests. The credit cost is on its pricing page.

SerpApi

• Price: $25 a month for 1,000 searches, $75 for 5,000, $150 for 15,000, $725 for 100,000 and $3,750 for 1 million. The Maps API pages by 20, so we count one search as about 20 places: $1.25 per 1,000 places on Starter, $0.50 on Production. The page does not state the Maps credit cost.
• Free tier: 250 searches a month, 50 an hour. Only successful, uncached searches count.

Outscraper

• Price: $3 per 1,000 places from the 501st to the 100,000th, then $1. Reviews are priced the same way. Its pricing page says “No monthly fees. No recurring billing.” and credits never expire.
• Free tier and watch-outs: the first 500 places and 500 reviews. “Tiers reset every 30 days”, so the $1 rate needs over 100,000 places in a 30-day window.

Apify Google Maps Scraper

• Price: pay per place: $0.004 on the Free plan, $0.003 on Starter ($19 a month), $0.002 on Scale ($199) and $0.0015 on Business ($999), per the actor page and plans page.
• Free tier and watch-outs: $5 of usage a month, which is 1,250 places at $0.004. Add-ons are billed per place (on Free: filters $0.001 each, extra details and contact enrichment $0.002).

Bright Data

• Price: $1.50 per 1,000 records pay as you go, or Scale at $499 a month with 384,000 records and $1.30 per 1,000 beyond. Its pricing page lists a free tier of 5K records a month with no card. We assume one place is one record.

SearchApi

• Price: $40 a month for 10,000 searches ($4 per 1,000) up to $250 for 100,000. It lists 100 free requests, one-off or monthly not stated. Its Maps engine docs do not say how many places a page holds, so we give no per-place figure.

What it costs at 1K, 10K, 100K and 1M places

Vendors compare on per-call prices; your bill depends on places. This table prices one month of places with phone, website and rating on the cheapest published plan or tier that covers the volume. The sums are ours; they are not an offer from any vendor.

Checked 2026-10-23. Serpent Growth needs a one-time $100 deposit and Scale $500; the deposit is spendable balance. Serpent assumes full 20-place pages (a short response is billed the same). Google is priced at its first paid tier, $35.00 per 1,000 requests, because no volume discount applies below 100,000 requests a month. DataForSEO assumes 100 listings per SERP. Scrapingdog is 5 credits per 20-place request. *SerpApi assumes 20 places and one search per Maps page; Bright Data assumes one place is one record and that pay as you go applies after the free 5K. Outscraper and Apify are base place prices only.

How the rows were built: Google is requests (places divided by 20) minus 1,000 free, times $35.00 per 1,000. DataForSEO is SERPs (places divided by 100) times $0.0006. Scrapingdog and SerpApi are the smallest plan that holds the volume. Bright Data at 1 million is Scale: $499 plus 616,000 records at $1.30 per 1,000.

Plan-based vendors cost more at small volumes: 1,000 places is $40 on Scrapingdog and 75 cents on Serpent’s Default rate. At large volumes, DataForSEO’s Standard queue is far lower than anyone’s enriched price, in exchange for waiting and a $50 top-up. Serpent’s first deposit is $10; once lifetime deposits reach $50, later top-ups have a $100 minimum.

Now the price claim, kept honest. Serpent’s Quick call at Default, $0.75 per 1,000 places, is below Google’s $1.75, SerpApi Starter’s $1.25, Bright Data’s $1.50, Outscraper’s $3 and Apify’s Free-plan $4, and above DataForSEO, Scrapingdog and SerpApi from Production up. Serpent’s List mode, $0.005 per 1,000 places, is the lowest printed per-place figure we found, by a small margin over DataForSEO’s $0.006, but it returns core records only. Our Maps API price comparison and cost per enriched place post go deeper.

Reviews follow the same pattern. By our arithmetic, 100,000 reviews on Serpent’s Default rate is 5,000 calls at $0.003: $15.00 if every page is full. Outscraper is $298.50, Apify’s Free plan $50, and Google about $475 (at most 5 reviews a place, $25 per 1,000 Enterprise + Atmosphere requests after 1,000 free).

How to choose

• You show places live in your own app. Start with Google’s free allowance and its terms. It is built for that.
• You plan to keep results long term. Read the Maps Platform terms of whichever API you choose, and ask your own counsel.
• Rich records, no plan. Serpent: pay per call, with popular times, amenities, ownership and reviews in one shape. On the numbers above, this is where it is the pick.
• Huge ranked lists and you can wait. DataForSEO Standard, after the $50 top-up.
• Steady volume on a monthly bill. Scrapingdog, or SerpApi from Production up.
• Biggest free trial. Bright Data (5K records), SerpApi (about 5,000 places) or Outscraper (500). All beat Serpent’s 10 free calls, up to 200 places on Quick.
• Open data and your own hosting. Foursquare Open Source Places or OpenStreetMap.

Related guides: our Maps business data API comparison, the Maps-to-verified-email lead pipeline, finding businesses without websites, local SEO rank tracking and the local rank tracking API. For other engines: free Google SERP API guide, free news API and free image search API.

Quick start: places and reviews in a request

Send your key in the X-API-Key header. This asks for the first 20 plumbers in Austin:

curl -G "https://apiserpent.com/api/maps/search/quick" \
  --data-urlencode "q=plumber" \
  --data-urlencode "location=Austin, TX" \
  -d "country=us" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

The same call from Python. Page through the list with start set to 0, 20, 40, 60 and 80:

import os
import requests

resp = requests.get(
    "https://apiserpent.com/api/maps/search/quick",
    params={"q": "plumber", "location": "Austin, TX", "country": "us", "start": 0},
    headers={"X-API-Key": os.environ["SERPENT_API_KEY"]},
    timeout=60,
)
data = resp.json()

for p in data.get("places", []):
    # detail_status is "complete" or "core_only"; a null on a core_only row means unknown
    print(p["rank"], p["name"], p["phone"], p["website"], p["rating"],
          p["review_count"], p["detail_status"])

Then fetch one place and its newest reviews by place_id:

curl "https://apiserpent.com/api/maps/place?place_id=PLACE_ID" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

curl "https://apiserpent.com/api/maps/reviews?place_id=PLACE_ID&sort=newest" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

Read detail_status before you trust a record. The counts block says how many places were requested, returned and fully enriched. A reviews call returns up to 20 reviews and a next_page_token that expires after 15 minutes. The full parameter list is in the API docs; you can run the same call in the playground first.

Moving over from Google’s Places API

• Google caps a text search at 20 places a page and 60 in total. Serpent’s Quick pages 20 at a time up to 100, and a deep call returns up to 100 ranked places.
• Place and Reviews accept a place_id, a data_id or a Google Maps URL. Decide your own storage and use rules first; see the terms section above.

For worked builds, see reviews in Python, place details fields and credit expiry.

Limits and what we could not verify

• Foursquare’s free allowance: its page prints 500 free Pro calls in the rate table and 10,000 in the blurb, and we did not verify places per search.
• Units: SerpApi and SearchApi do not state the credit cost of a Maps search, SearchApi does not state places per page, and Bright Data’s “record” is assumed to be one place. DataForSEO prints no trial amount.
• Full pages assumed: real responses can be shorter at every vendor, including ours.
• Google’s terms: quoted, with no legal view on how they apply to any third-party API.
• No benchmarks: no claim about speed, accuracy or coverage for any service, including ours. Prices move, so re-check before you commit.

FAQ

Is the Google Maps API free?

Partly. Since March 2025 each Google Maps Platform product has its own monthly free allowance instead of the old $200 credit: 10,000 calls for Essentials products, 5,000 for Pro and 1,000 for Enterprise. Place IDs are free without limit, but phone and website sit in the Enterprise tier at $35.00 per 1,000 requests after the free allowance.

Does Google still give a $200 monthly credit?

No. Google's March 2025 page says it replaced the USD $200 monthly recurring credit with a free monthly usage threshold for each Core Services SKU. Allowances no longer pool across products. Several guides still describe the old credit, so check Google's pricing page.

Is there a free API for Google Maps business data, such as phone numbers and reviews?

Not at any size. Google's free calls return IDs, and phone, website and rating start in the Enterprise tier with 1,000 free requests a month. Reviews are capped at 5 per place. Open data is free but is a different dataset. Hosted APIs offer free tiers from 100 requests to 5,000 records.

Can I store Google Maps data in my own database?

Google's Maps Platform terms restrict storing and exporting place data, so read them and ask your own counsel before you build a database. We are not lawyers.

What is the best free alternative to the Google Places API?

It depends on the job. OpenStreetMap's Nominatim is free for address search at up to 1 request a second. Foursquare Open Source Places is a free download under Apache 2.0. Neither returns Google ratings, reviews or ranking. For Google's own business data, the near-free route is a hosted Maps data API.

What is the cheapest Google Maps data API?

It depends on the unit. On rates printed on 2026-10-23, DataForSEO's Standard queue is about $0.006 per 1,000 places, with a $50 minimum top-up. Serpent's list mode is $0.005 per 1,000 places but returns core records only, and its enriched Quick call is $0.75 per 1,000 places at the Default tier.

Sources

• Google Maps Platform core services pricing list
• Google: March 2025 pricing changes
• Places API Text Search (New)
• Places API Place resource reference
• Places API policies and attributions
• Google Maps Platform Terms of Service
• Google Maps Platform Service Specific Terms
• Nominatim usage policy
• Overpass API (OpenStreetMap wiki)
• Foursquare pricing
• Foursquare Open Source Places
• gosom/google-maps-scraper (GitHub)
• DataForSEO Google Maps SERP API pricing
• Scrapingdog Google Maps API
• SerpApi pricing
• Outscraper pricing
• Apify Google Maps Scraper
• Bright Data Web Scraper API pricing
• SearchApi pricing