My day was going great, I was in a good mood after checking our newly updated MRR on Stripe, and I decided to open my email to see if there were any questions from customers to answer. That's when I noticed an email from Google, entitled " ", and my day took a slightly different turn. Google Cloud Platform & APIs: Payment received I open the email. " ", it says in big bold letters. "Great", everything's running smoothly, right? Payment Received Wrong. Your payment of $1,000.00 was applied to Google Cloud Platform & APIs on Jun 21, 2021. Excuse me? $1000? And the month hasn't even ended. "Well maybe it's just a mistake" I think to myself, as I open the Developer API console. A beautiful colorful graph to tell you how much they're screwing you out of. But no, lo and behold, after opening 15 different Billing subsections each with less descriptive names than the next (" ", " ", " ", " ") and not finding an answer to the simple question " ", I finally manage to view what our consumption for the month was (I tried to get back to it as I wrote this article, and couldn't even find it anymore). It seems that we are paying for what we consumed. There's only one little issue: Cost table Cost breakdown Commitments Commitments analysis How many calls did we make on the API this month? in fact Just one little issue... we've made about 226,000 API calls in total this month. What? What? What? How could this be? I still don't understand it, but apparently it should make sense: Why are we paying for Atmosphere Data and what the hell does that even mean? I guess Google felt they could use an extra $100 bucks on "Contact Data", whatever that is. Just to break it down, that's: dollars for requests on the Places API $560 32,998 on Autocomplete requests $345.57 127,566 on Atmosphere Data: I've been using Places/Autocomplete, why am I even paying for Atmosphere Data? $165.01 Throw in an extra on "Contact Data", what's an extra $100 at this point? $99 Well... this explains why the pricing pages are so obscure on Google's API products. Maybe But my favorite part is that we weren't actually paying the full price, this is our ! How generous of them! discounted price Oh, and if that still doesn't make sense, here's another breakdown of the pricing for you. Yeah add a few dropdowns everywhere, that'll make it clearer: Google's reporting is hell on earth That's when I started looking into alternatives. And thankfully, there are a decent amount of them out there in 2021: , , and just to name a few. Mapbox OpenCageData LocationIQ GeoCod.IO In the end, I settled on Mapbox: it's not the cheapest of all options but it seemed to strike a good balance between affordability and data relevance, with the most relevant results in Autocomplete across the space. And coming from Google's mess of a console, their no-nonsense dashboard is also extremely refreshing: Mapbox's simple reporting UI Now, our first 100,000 calls are free every month, and we'll be paying $0.75 per extra 1000 calls, . at a maximum At this month's rate, that breaks down to around total. $94 A tenth of Google's price! By now you've guessed I surely won't be using any of Google's APIs without heavy scrutiny of the pricing and the alternatives moving forward. Hopefully this article can help a few more people think twice before blindly heading for the default choice. Footnote : While I'm highly satisfied with Mapbox's service and offering so far, this article was in no way sponsored or requested by Mapbox .I am merely a disillusioned Google customer who found a glass of water in hell. Looking to set up your own custom job board for your community? Head over to Niceboard.co to start your free 7 day trial!

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