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Since there is a new billing for the use of Google Places API and Google Places SDK, i'm looking to use a free alternative or an alternative with more interesting quotas before paying for these use cases :

  • Nearby Search (need to find restaurant)
  • Place Details
  • Autocomplete

Does anyone know such a solution ?

Thanks anyway

JohnDot
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    Possible duplicate of [What is a good, unlimited alternative to Google Places API?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17959575/what-is-a-good-unlimited-alternative-to-google-places-api) – Rick Oct 05 '18 at 10:39
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    @RickvanOsta No it's not, my question is since Google changed their billing plan. – JohnDot Oct 05 '18 at 18:43
  • Here.com has an API that is free up to 250K request per month. – NFB Nov 07 '18 at 20:16
  • @NFB i think you don't have venues at here.com. I mean you cant find restaurants, bars etc... Or at least I could not find anything like this on the platform. – dcts Oct 12 '20 at 12:30

3 Answers3

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Here are some with at least free tiers:

MapBox has 50K pre transactions per month

MapQuest has 15K/mo

Here.com (formerly Bing Maps) has 250K requests per month.

and OpenCageData has a "free trial" with 2,500 requests per day, though it appears you have to sign up to find out what is meant by "free trial."

Also note that Google Maps still has a $200 monthly credit for each billing account, after the 1 year of free transition time:

For each billing account, a monthly $200 USD Google Maps Platform credit is available and automatically applied to the qualifying SKUs.

For each use of each API you can see in these tables a column called "$200 MONTHLY CREDIT EQUIVALENT FREE USAGE" which shows how much usage falls within the monthly free allotment. It's complicated and you have to go through the tables and compute how much of each service you think you'll need. However for many use cases you can still end up using these APIs free. For now, anyway.

NFB
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  • Regarding Google 1 year transition - "on or before the free trial ends, you must upgrade your first Cloud Billing account to a paid account. Once you have upgraded, the $200 monthly credit will continue to be applied to your Cloud Billing account, even after the free trial ends." - the $200 monthly credit is for the lifetime according to https://developers.google.com/maps/billing-and-pricing/billing#monthly-credit – Daryl Teo Jul 29 '22 at 03:08
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As mentionned in the near-duplicate question What is a good, unlimited alternative to Google Places API?:

  • Foursquare Venues is a candidate.
  • Factual is also a candidate if your application is user-centric (they gradually suppressed the access to the Web-API)

Plus, you could add Facebook:

WebRoamer
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Algolia Places seems to be a very powerful tool (I have not tried it yet). And it does not depend on Google.

Current conditions include 1000 queries/day for free.

J0ANMM
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