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For my project I've been relying on the Places API to search for POI's based on a desired query string and distance from a given point. As things are scaling up, however, I'm hitting the usage limits for Places really fast. Does anyone know of another API that doesn't have usage limits (or significantly more uses) that could substitute for the Places API?

Thanks

rogerrw
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First up, I hope you know that you can bump your Places API quota from 1,000 queries/day up to 100,000 queries/day just by verifying your identity? This doesn't cost anything. And if even 100,000 QPD are not enough, you can purchase a Google Places API for Business license.

But to actually answer your question, I'm not aware of any alternative that's both good and unlimited. The main competitors with worldwide coverage are:

lambshaanxy
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    I love Foursquare, its free and 120k per day is pretty good limit (at least when starting of). The problem is, that it requires the users location to find places and whiles thats good for near by places, its NOT good for searching for places far away. So if your in the US and want to search for the Eiffel Tower - France, you will get no results :( – Supertecnoboff May 11 '16 at 11:37
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    I think Factual's Global Places is now paid only? – david Jul 29 '18 at 06:30
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    Google has revised their pricing for Places API. Now nothing is free. – Rahul Tiwari Feb 13 '19 at 06:23
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    @RahulTiwari Quite the opposite: basic data is now free & unlimited, and you get $200/mo in free credits for premium data. See https://developers.google.com/places/web-service/usage-and-billing#basic-data. – lambshaanxy Feb 13 '19 at 11:01
  • @jpatokal Yes you are right..thanks :) – Rahul Tiwari Feb 14 '19 at 09:16
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    @jpatokal "Basic is now free & unlimited" is not true. The basic data is included in all "Place requests" which start at $0.017 / request and it says so in the link you provided. – rdadkins Feb 28 '19 at 16:11
  • @rdadkina Oops, you're right! Can't edit my comment anymore... but you can apply the free credit to those requests. – lambshaanxy Feb 28 '19 at 23:00
  • Google maps api for places cost $30/1000 request. – Alwaysblue May 20 '20 at 15:30
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    Ridiculously expensive. If we are not allowed to store Google Places names, then the api is useless to me. – html_programmer Dec 30 '20 at 20:02