[LTER-im] Google Maps API to require credit card?

[Wade Sheldon]

Hi everyone,

For those (probably most) of you employing Google Maps for your websites, I just received notice that the services are being consolidated under a "Google Maps Platform" and all use of the JavaScript API will require an API key linked to a credit card and billing account, which is a non-starter for us and I suspect most other institutions. There's $200 of free use and tools to set quotas to avoid going over, but we simply can't deal with CC billing at UGA for something like this.

Here's the gist:

"We would like to highlight a few updates that may impact your implementation. Beginning June 11th, we are launching our new pricing plan and providing all users access to support. We’ll continue to offer a free tier — all developers will receive $200 of free monthly usage of our core products.

*In addition, this change will require you to enable billing and associate it with all of your Google Maps Platform projects.* Creating a billing account helps us better understand your usage so we can continue developing helpful products. It also allows you to scale easily with less downtime and fewer performance issues if your product grows beyond the $200 of free monthly usage. For additional visibility and control you can set daily quotas or billing alerts."

The guide for existing users (https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/user-guide/) indicates they are supposedly "expanding support for non-profits" so there are potentially work-arounds, at least at the institutional level, but not a hassle we really need just to keep our stuff running.

More of the high cost of using free stuff I guess.

Anyway, let us know if anyone hears anything different on this topic, or finds a work-around, and we'll be researching the non-profit angle this month.

Sigh....

Wade Sheldon
GCE-LTER