It can be tough to optimize your cloud usage and spend. For example, those great Google Maps you’re sharing on your website can tally up costs quickly on a pay-as-you-go basis. All of the APIs used in those maps are billed that way.
That includes the latest edition, Google Maps Platform - Places API, which delivers a rich location-based experience by using HTTP requests to surface results. As you might guess, those requests can get costly if you don’t accurately measure and optimize your Google Maps Platform Places API usage and spend.
How Does the Places API Billing Model Work?
Places API requests drive billing in Google Maps Platform’s pay-as-you-go model. These requests include:
- Place Search
- Place Details
- Place Photos
- Place Autocomplete
- Query Autocomplete
Places API requests are billed at a granular level. Each request is tracked by one or more product SKUs. These requests allow you to specify what kinds of place data to return with a selection of any or all of three billing categories based on data types.
Data-type categories include Basic, Contact and Atmosphere data. Google bills each of these data types at different rates and uses different SKUs. Depending on the data type used in the request, it might trigger one of more SKUs for a single API. And, if all or no fields are used, all SKUs trigger automatically. The cost calculation formula is SKU Usage x Price per each use.
How Can I Maximize My Places API Usage and Billing?
With a pay-as-you-go billing model, it can be easy to lose track of spend and usage activity, properly managing your billing account. One way to make sure you properly manage your budget is to set daily quota limits.
Quota limits work for all requests to any billable Google Maps API. In this case, you would set this for your Places API requests using Google Cloud Platform Console. If your Places API usage reaches quota on any given day, your app will not be able to access the API for the remainder of that billing day.
This has limitations. Shutting down an API for any length of time can hamper the usability of your overall Google Maps Platform experience. Using a comprehensive cloud billing and budget management solution, such as OnSpend by Onix, can help you better track usage and know when overages are about to occur.
With OnSpend, you can efficiently and effectively manage the budget and billing process associated with your accounts and projects, allowing you to actively visualize your Google Maps Platform usage and costs.
You can begin by determining actual usage and spend across accounts to create a handy visual representation that allows you to plan for possible usage spikes and to forecast future use. It also will help you better understand how your customers use your services.
Solutions like OnSpend allow you to put resources like your APIs on a watch list and set up budget alerts to warn you when an API is at risk of going over budget, delivering automated cost control.
This is a basic overview of how to optimize Places API usage and spend. Depending on the kind of Places API request you make, things can get a little more complicated. But this is a high-level overview of how you can start optimizing your Places API usage and budget.
We want to be sure you understand how Google Maps Platform works and how you can keep billing and budget challenges under control. Take a look at our other blogs on these topics to stay in the know!
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