$0.50 per 1000 maps is way better pricing than $4 per 1000 maps, yet still a lot more expensive than using OpenStreetMap even if you factor in CPU and bandwidth costs to run your own data/tile servers.

Assuming OSM is "good enough" for your usage when compared to Google Maps, I don't think this pricing change really modifies the decision much for a lot of people.

This may slow down the tide of those switching over but I don't think it will reverse or stop it.

"Closing the barn door after the horse is gone" is the first thing that popped into my mind when I read this headline.

The second thing was that they were being "penny wise and pound foolish" when they raised prices in the first place (last October, I guess it was). So they got like six months of revenue bump, pissed a lot of people off and created an opportunity for at least one big and viable competitor. Smart.

And now they flip flop.

The message is that if they think they can bend you over a barrel and have their way, they will. And then, if the competitive landscape changes, giving you a chance to get their dick out of your *ss, they will try to kiss and makeup (until they sense their next opportunity to bend you over). What did idiot Bush say? "Fool me once, shame on you... Fool me twice..." http://youtu.be/eKgPY1adc0A

It's pretty shady how Google muscled out the competition by offering Google Maps for free after the acquisition of Keyhole. They basically murdered MapQuest and other "overpriced" solutions only to raise their price to even higher levels once they had a near monopoly on the embedded maps market. Clever, but dirty. Certainly this could be considered "evil".

Wow. The parties that will ultimately suffer most from this are Navteq and TomTom, which now charge between one and two orders of magnitude more than Google for map data.

For car makers seeking to add built-in navigation to their vehicles, Google Maps is now a much more compelling choice than either of those two companies' offerings.

(FWIW, TomTom is reportedly Apple's supplier of map data.)

We switched from Google Maps to OSM because they were too expensive. Now that we are using the Leaflet JS lib, we are really happy with it. Not only is it a fairly nice API, but it is open source, so it is much easier to debug than working with Google's obfuscated code. Even with this price reduction, I see no reason to even consider switching back.

The only downside to OSM is that we needed the tiles served up through https since our site is always https, but there are workarounds for that. ;-)

There's a good discussion on this over at the Reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/vhj7g/google_sl...

I found this comment very interesting:

"I'm a developer for a major online brand and finding our locations is an utterly crucial part of our business. When Google started charging us for mapping they played hard when coming to a deal to pay for their services. They spelled out a price and there was no negotiating. The arrogance from anyone we had contact with at Google was mind-blowing. We quietly re-developed our location search to use to Bing and pulled the trigger one day. Needless to say Microsoft was more than happy to have our business and was very helpful. As far as mapping, Bing is surprisingly accurate and competitive. We've never looked back. Google wanted over 2 million per year just to show our locations."

about.

damn.

time.

Yes... they'd only recently hiked their prices (last year?) but they shouldn't have in the first place. I'd priced out using google maps for a service, and it was cost prohibitive. However, so was bing maps, and getting a firm price from bing was even harder because my use case didn't fit in 'standard use cases'. In our case, apparently using a mobile app to add metadata to a location constituted 'asset tracking', which puts you in to a whole other level of pricing stratosphere.

I just get the feeling that many mapping apps out there that use google/bing/whatever are totally skirting the actual real pricing and use case terms, much like loads of people copy Photoshop. As long as Adobe turns a blind eye to some level of piracy, it keeps Photoshop top of mind and gives people fewer reasons to seek alternatives.

It's about time. It's nice to see Google is feeling the pressure from other (relatively up-and-coming) mapping services like OpenStreetMaps and MapBox to the point where they actually made their prices more competitive. Also I've worked with several large websites who have moved from GMaps to Bing Maps over the past few years.

GMaps is great, but ultimately not worth the price at $4/1000, especially for a small site operator like myself.

I don't like google more and more...when they didn't feel any competition out there, they gave you a very high price. And when there are some other choices, they reduce the price sharply. Why not just give the developers the low price first?

Take the GAE as the example, if you enable billing, you have to pay at least $9 a month, no matter how much more you are using over the quota.

Now, Google is not friendly to developers at all.

This price reduction looks like it is only for sites supported by advertising / unmonetised sites.

Any startup planning on charging for an app or service which incorporates any kind of map will still have to pay a minimum $10,000 a year license fee to use Google Maps, which is ridiculously high as a starting point.

What Googles mishandling of the charging changes has done is to heavily publicise the fact that the alternatives (mainly OSM) are now good enough for major companies to switch to without much hassle.

iOS 6 may be a big part of this. They might have preferred to reduce prices to other customers before but if they offered it to everyone they would have had to offer it to Apple who may have been the majority of their maps revenue and it was also a mechanism to add cost to Android's key competition.

Now Apple are leaving anyway the difference that the price cut makes will be smaller (in absolute terms) and it will not harm Android either.

Good to see OpenStreetMap starting to really shake up geodata.

I wonder if will affect Geocoding limits too?

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/#...

Wow this is fantastic news. We are in the process of shifting some of our usage to OSM (and will likely continue) but this makes GMaps a reasonable expense now.

We developed some webbased application using Google Maps and before going in beta, had to change to OSM because of change of Google's pricing structure (we simply cannot afford the 10.000+$ API Premier license fee). But we are hopelessly stuck with OSM are not able to determine the exact location based on address details. Is anyone interested to help out for a few hundred $ ....?

Thank goodness! I made a speed trap tracking (vroomtrap.com -- graveyard) program a while ago that never got off the ground, but when I heard about their price increase, I was dumbfounded. All in all; I have been pretty amazed by Google's new "monetize everything" initiative.

Glad to see that competition from OSM and others is keeping them in check.

I hope they will do same with appengine prices. I'd be willing to return if they had more reasonable pricing.

This doesn't seem to affect their Enterprise prices does it?

Someone's afraid of iOS 6 Beta 2.

A bit too late?