New pricing changes went into effect on July 16, 2018. For more information, check out the Guide for Existing Users.

Directions API Usage and Billing

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Enabling billing

To enable billing, we'll guide you through the Google Cloud Platform Console to complete a few tasks:

  1. Create or choose a project
  2. Set up or choose your billing profile
  3. Enable billing on your project
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Pricing and Billing Changes

A new pay-as-you-go pricing model is now in effect for Google Maps Platform APIs. The new plan gives you more flexibility and control over how you use our APIs. You can use as much or as little as you need and only pay for what you use each month.

Requests per Day (QPD) limits have ended, effective June 11, 2018

For Existing Customers:

  • If you are an existing customer (using the Google Maps Platform before June 11, 2018), you were billed under the previous pay-as-you-go pricing until July 16, 2018.
  • Note: Starting on June 11, 2018, Google began to roll out the removal of the default QPD limits on existing billing accounts. This process may take up to six weeks.
  • If you rely on the default QPD limits to help you manage your cost of use, we recommend you set your own daily limits in the Google Cloud Platform Console, to override the default QPD limits set by Google. This will ensure that your preferred QPD limits remain in place.

For New Customers:

  • If you are a new customer (using the Google Maps Platform starting on or after June 11, 2018), you were billed under the previous pay-as-you-go pricing until July 16, 2018.
  • Note: New customers began receiving unlimited QPD starting on June 11, 2018.
  • To help you manage your cost of use, you can set your own QPD limits in the Google Cloud Platform Console.

New Pay-As-You-Go Pricing

Effective July 16, 2018

How billing works under the new pay-as-you-go model

  • The Google Maps Platform APIs are billed by SKU.
  • Usage is tracked for each Product SKU, and an API may have more than one Product SKU.
  • Cost is calculated by: SKU Usage x Price per each use.
  • For each billing account, for qualifying Google Maps Platform SKUs, a $200 USD Google Maps Platform credit is available each month, and automatically applied to the qualifying SKUs.

See guide to understanding billing for more information.

Important: Enable Billing

As of July 16, 2018, to continue to use the Google Maps Platform APIs, you must enable billing on each of your projects. If you choose not to add a billing account, your maps will be degraded, or other Maps API requests will return an error.

Pricing for the Directions API

In the previous pricing model, one SKU was used for all Directions API requests. In the new pay-as-you-go pricing model, Directions API requests generate one of two SKUs, depending on the type of request: basic or advanced.

Effective July 16, 2018, the Directions API is priced as follows:

SKU: Directions

A request to the Directions API or the Maps JavaScript API’s Directions Service (excludes requests triggering the Directions Advanced billing SKU).

MONTHLY VOLUME RANGE
(Price per QUERY)
0–100,000 100,001–500,000 500,000+
0.005 USD per each
(5.00 USD per 1000)		 0.004 USD per each
(4.00 USD per 1000)		 Contact Sales for volume pricing

SKU: Directions Advanced

A request to the Directions API or the Maps JavaScript API’s Directions Service that uses traffic information, more than 10 waypoints, and/or waypoints optimization.

MONTHLY VOLUME RANGE
(Price per QUERY)
0–100,000 100,001–500,000 500,000+
0.01 USD per each
(10.00 USD per 1000)		 0.008 USD per each
(8.00 USD per 1000)		 Contact Sales for volume pricing

A Directions Advanced SKU is charged for a Directions API request or a Maps JavaScript API’s Directions Service that uses one or more of the following:

  • Traffic information. Traffic information is used when all the following apply (these are the conditions required to receive the duration_in_traffic field in the Directions response):
    • The travel mode parameter is driving, or is not specified (driving is the default travel mode).
    • The request includes a valid departure_time parameter. The departure_time can be set to the current time or some time in the future. It cannot be in the past.
    • The request does not include stopover waypoints. If the request includes waypoints, prefix each waypoint with via: to influence the route but avoid stopovers. For example, 
      &waypoints=via:San Francisco|via:Mountain View|...
  • More than 10 waypoints (between 11 and 25).
  • Waypoints optimization. The optimize parameter is set to true for waypoints. For example, 
    &waypoints=optimize:true|San Francisco|Mountain View|...

Other Usage Limits

While you are no longer limited to a maximum number of requests per day (QPD), the following usage limits are still in place for the Directions API:

Terms of Use Restrictions

For information on terms of use, see policies for the Directions API, and the License Restrictions section of the Google Maps Platform Terms of Service.

Manage Your Cost of Use

To manage your cost of use of the Google Maps Platform APIs, you can set daily limits to all requests to any billable API.

To view or change daily billable limits for the Directions API, do the following:

  1. Go to the Directions API Quotas page in the Google Cloud Platform Console.
  2. From the projects list, select a project.
  3. In the Requests section, on the Requests per day line, click the edit icon, then enter the preferred total billable daily quota, up to the limit (if any) specified by Google.

If your API usage reaches your billable limit on any given day, your application will not be able to access the API for the remainder of that day.

Related resources

Premium Plan Customers

In order to switch over to the new pay-as-you-go pricing plan, you must create a new project, as your existing Premium project cannot be transferred. You must get new API keys, and use them to replace your existing keys. Please contact your account manager and/or reseller to coordinate your transition to the new plan before your current Premium license expires.

Directions API Usage Limits for Existing Premium Plan Users

Google Maps APIs Premium Plan customers:

  • Shared daily free quota of 100,000 requests per 24 hours; additional requests applied against the annual purchase of Maps APIs Credits.
  • Up to 23 waypoints allowed in each request, plus the origin and destination, whether client-side or server-side queries.
  • 50* server-side requests per second.

* Default limit. Contact your Google Enterprise Sales Account Manager if you need a higher limit. Note that the client-side service offers Unlimited requests per second, per project.

Additional benefits of a premium plan:

  • Annual contracts with enterprise terms
  • 24 hour technical support
  • Service level agreement (SLA)
  • Licenses for internal, OEM, and asset tracking use cases

See the Premium Plan guide for more info.

Previous Pay-As-You-Go Usage Limits and Pricing

Until July 16, 2018, the Directions API had the following limits in place:

Standard Usage Limits and Billing

Users of the standard API:

  • 2,500 free directions requests per day, calculated as the sum of client-side and server-side queries.
  • Up to 23 waypoints allowed in each request, whether client-side or server-side queries.
  • 50 requests per second, calculated as the sum of client-side and server-side queries.

Enable pay-as-you-go billing to unlock higher quotas:

$0.50 USD / 1000 additional requests, up to 100,000 daily.

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