The pricing tiers in this article do not include the additional levels of volume discounts which are available if your usage is high. You need to contact a partner or the google sales team to get details of those additional tiers.
The small fry like these kind of people are not google's real customers - the real customers were already paying to use the APIs before these changes happened.
The free limits before were hugely generous. There is a cost involved in offering the free service. If you weren't paying for it, then google was losing money. If you stop using google for free now because of this, then they actually save money and can now dedicate those resources to supporting actual paying customers for which there are many. Sure individual small users are a drop in the ocean, but multiply that up by many thousands and thousands...
Mapping is commoditized. There are many free and paid-for competitors as the article states. If you want the extra value that google offers and chose to stick with using them, then you need to pay for it now. I dont think that is unreasonable. If you dont want to pay for the service and continue getting something valuable for nothing, then go and leech MapBox/Here/someone else's free limits instead. See how long a small company without google's resources can support thousands of startups hammering their services & infrastructure without any revenue to pay for it.
The pricing tiers in this article do not include the additional levels of volume discounts which are available if your usage is high. You need to contact a partner or the google sales team to get details of those additional tiers.
The small fry like these kind of people are not google's real customers - the real customers were already paying to use the APIs before these changes happened.
The free limits before were hugely generous. There is a cost involved in offering the free service. If you weren't paying for it, then google was losing money. If you stop using google for free now because of this, then they actually save money and can now dedicate those resources to supporting actual paying customers for which there are many. Sure individual small users are a drop in the ocean, but multiply that up by many thousands and thousands...
Mapping is commoditized. There are many free and paid-for competitors as the article states. If you want the extra value that google offers and chose to stick with using them, then you need to pay for it now. I dont think that is unreasonable. If you dont want to pay for the service and continue getting something valuable for nothing, then go and leech MapBox/Here/someone else's free limits instead. See how long a small company without google's resources can support thousands of startups hammering their services & infrastructure without any revenue to pay for it.
Good luck.