Google Places API Pricing 2026: Cost Per 1,000 Businesses

Every guide to Google Places API pricing prices the same customer: an app with a search box, billed per autocomplete session. If what you're building is a call list, that unit is worthless. The number you need — what 1,000 distinct businesses with a phone number attached cost to pull — appears on no pricing page.

So here it is, worked from Google's published SKU rates two ways, one costing eleven times the other for identical data. Then what decides whether the API suits the job at all: which fields come back, which four never do, and what the terms let you keep.

One caveat before the numbers. Everything below is Google's US list pricing, from the Maps Platform pricing and SKU documentation, read on August 17, 2026. The structure has been reworked twice since 2023 and rates vary by region and volume, so check each figure against Google's live SKU page before you budget against it.

How Google Places API pricing works in 2026

The March 2025 reset killed the $200 credit

The model most tutorials still describe no longer exists. Until March 1, 2025, every project got a recurring $200 monthly credit spendable across any Maps, Routes, or Places SKU. Google retired it in favor of a per-SKU monthly allotment of free calls:

• Essentials SKUs: 10,000 free calls per SKU, per month.
• Pro SKUs: 5,000 free calls per SKU, per month.
• Enterprise SKUs: 1,000 free calls per SKU, per month.

The per-SKU part matters more than the headline number. A $200 balance could be burned entirely on one expensive call type. Now every SKU carries its own bucket, and the buckets don't pool — unused Essentials calls will not subsidize Enterprise usage.

Every request bills at the tier of the priciest field you ask for

The Places API (New) requires a field mask on every call. You declare which fields you want, and the SKU you're charged is set by the highest-tier field in that list. Ask for one Enterprise field alongside twenty Essentials fields and the whole request bills at Enterprise.

Roughly how the tiers divide: Essentials covers identity and location — place ID, formatted address, coordinates, place types. Pro adds display name, business status, and primary type. Enterprise holds the fields a salesperson cares about: national and international phone number, website URI, rating, user rating count, opening hours, price level. Enterprise + Atmosphere adds review text, editorial summaries, and the amenity attributes.

That one decision sets your whole bill: phone, website, and rating are Enterprise fields, and no cheap tier quietly includes them.

The Places API rates that matter for list building

Published US list prices in the 0–100,000 monthly call band, as of August 2026:

• Text Search or Nearby Search, Essentials (IDs only): $5 per 1,000 requests.
• Place Details, Essentials: $5 per 1,000 requests.
• Place Details, Pro: $17 per 1,000 requests.
• Place Details, Enterprise: $20 per 1,000 requests.
• Place Details, Enterprise + Atmosphere: $25 per 1,000 requests.
• Text Search or Nearby Search, Pro: $32 per 1,000 requests.
• Text Search or Nearby Search, Enterprise: $35 per 1,000 requests.
• Text Search or Nearby Search, Enterprise + Atmosphere: $40 per 1,000 requests.
• Volume discounts apply above 100,000 monthly calls on a given SKU.

Note the unit on every line: per request, not per business. Most write-ups on Google Maps API pricing stop right here, and the conversion between those two units is the entire story for prospecting.

Google Places API cost per 1,000 businesses

A search request returns up to 20 places. A Place Details request returns exactly one. Which of the two you build on moves your bill by more than an order of magnitude.

Path A: ask the search endpoint for everything (~$1.75 per 1,000)

Text Search and Nearby Search accept the same field mask as Place Details. Ask for phone number, website URI, rating, and user rating count inline on the search call and they arrive in the response — billed once, at the Enterprise search rate, for up to 20 businesses.

The arithmetic: 1,000 businesses ÷ 20 per response = 50 requests. 50 requests × $35 per 1,000 = $1.75.

That is $1.75 per 1,000 businesses carrying phone, site, rating, and review count — the genuine floor for a prospecting workload, and it is cheap.

Path B: enumerate IDs, then loop Place Details (~$20 per 1,000)

The pattern nearly every tutorial teaches: run a cheap ID-only search, then call Place Details once per ID.

• 50 ID-only search requests to collect 1,000 place IDs, at $5 per 1,000: $0.25.
• 1,000 Place Details calls at the Enterprise rate of $20 per 1,000: $20.00.
• Total: about $20.25 per 1,000 businesses — or $25.25 if you want review text, which pushes the details call to Enterprise + Atmosphere.

Same fields, roughly eleven times the price, purely because you paid per business instead of per twenty. If you've already built Path B, widening the field mask on your search call is the cheapest optimization you have, and it takes an afternoon.

Why your real invoice lands above both figures

Both numbers are floors. Three things push a live project above them, none of which appear on a pricing page.

• The 60-result ceiling. A single query returns at most 60 places, as three pages of 20, and pages two and three bill as separate requests at the same SKU. "Plumbers in Houston" will not hand you 400 plumbers — going deeper means subdividing by neighborhood, postcode, or a grid of coordinate circles, one fresh query per cell.
• Overlap. Subdivided searches keep returning businesses you already have, because anything near a cell boundary lands in both cells. Deduplicate on the place ID and expect to discard a real share of what you paid for — on tight grids, a third to a half is unremarkable.
• Everything Places doesn't do. The moment you bolt on a crawler to hunt for email addresses, you've opened a second cost center that never appears on the Maps invoice at all.

Budget at roughly $2.50–$4 per 1,000 distinct businesses on Path A and $25–$40 on Path B, before an hour of your own engineering counts. Against the per-row economics of running your own scraper, which we work through in lead scraping for local businesses, the API lands in a similar range — with the advantage of being the sanctioned route.

Is the Google Places API free?

Partly, and more generously than the question usually assumes. There's no trial clock: the allotment above is permanent and resets every month. What changed in 2025 is that it's allocated per SKU rather than as one shared credit.

For a Path A prospecting workload, the binding allotment is the Enterprise search SKU at 1,000 free requests a month. At up to 20 places per request, that's as many as 20,000 place records monthly at no charge before overlap — enough that plenty of one-person agencies never leave the free tier.

Two caveats. Billing has to be enabled on the project with a valid payment method even to consume the free calls, so "free" here means "not invoiced," not "no card." And because allotments are per SKU, an app mixing Essentials search, Enterprise details, and Place Photos draws down three buckets on three meters.

Which fields Places returns — and the four it never does

What comes back

• Identity and location: place ID, display name, formatted address and components, coordinates, place types.
• Status: operational, temporarily closed, or permanently closed, plus opening hours.
• Contact, at Enterprise: national and international phone number, website URI.
• Reputation: rating, user rating count, and review text at Enterprise + Atmosphere.
• Attributes: price level, accessibility, service, and payment options, plus the amenity set.

That's a strong business record. It is not a lead, and the gap is specific enough to name field by field.

The four fields you won't get at any price

• No email address. There is no email field on any Places SKU at any tier. The only route is following the website URI and crawling the site — a separate system with its own failure modes, returning nothing for the substantial share of local operators who have no website. The realistic hit rates are ranked in how to find business email addresses.
• No line type or carrier. The phone number Places returns is a display string. Whether it reaches a mobile, a landline, a VoIP box, or a toll-free routing number — and which carrier holds it this month — takes a separate lookup, and it's the field that decides whether a text can be delivered at all. The process is in how to verify phone numbers before cold calling.
• No owner name. Places describes a place. The person who signs your contract isn't in the schema, and reconstructing them means state registries, WHOIS records, review responses, or an About page.
• No verification of anything. Business status reports Google's last-known state of the listing, which is a different claim from "this mailbox accepts mail today" or "this number rings."

None of that is an oversight — Places is a maps product, and it returns what a map needs.

What Google's Maps Platform terms let you store

This decides whether a Places-built prospect list is something you may keep at all, and every pricing comparison skips it. What follows summarizes Google's published Maps Platform Terms of Service as of August 2026. It's an industry explainer, not legal advice, and nothing here is a compliance guarantee — read the live text yourself, because these clauses get revised and only the version in force when you build applies to you.

Place IDs are permanent; almost everything else runs 30 days

• The caching restriction permits temporary caching of Content for up to 30 consecutive calendar days, after which it must be refreshed or deleted.
• Place IDs are the headline exception and may be stored indefinitely, with Google's own guidance being to refresh any ID older than 12 months.
• Separate clauses prohibit mass download, creating your own content or database from Google Maps Content, and using the Content alongside a non-Google map.
• Attribution obligations attach to Content you display.

Read that list next to a CRM. A record holding a business name, address, phone, rating, and hours is Content sitting in durable storage, and the 30-day window is a design constraint, not a suggestion. If you're an agency handing a finished spreadsheet to a client, the redistribution and database-creation clauses — not the caching one — are what to take to a lawyer.

The one field worth capturing regardless

The permanently storable exception is also the most useful field in the response. A stable place identifier is what lets a re-run update an existing record instead of minting a second one, the failure behind most duplicated CRMs — the mechanics are in importing leads into GoHighLevel without duplicates. Capture the ID on your first pass whatever you build; retrofitting one onto a pile of name-and-address strings is grim work.

Where a lead-data API fits instead

Disclosure before the comparison: LeadMarina sells verified local-business leads, so we have an obvious stake in how this reads. The split below is the one we'd draw anyway, and half of it points at Google.

Use the Places API when

• You're building a map or store locator — any feature that displays places to a user, the use case the pricing and terms were designed around.
• You want Google-canonical records refreshed live, and you're content operating inside the caching window.
• Your deliverable is geographic or analytical rather than a call list.
• Your volume genuinely fits the per-SKU free tier, which ends the cost conversation.

Use a lead-data API when

• The output is outreach, and the four missing fields are precisely the ones that decide whether outreach can happen.
• The list needs to persist in a CRM as your working record rather than a 30-day cache.
• You'd rather pay one price per finished lead than maintain a pipeline stitched from search, details, a site crawler, an email verifier, and a phone lookup.

On our side of that line: you search by niche and city — up to 30 cities in one bulk run in the web app — and what's delivered has already been checked. Each business carries up to three SMTP-tested email addresses labeled safe, risky, or invalid, up to three phone numbers with line type and carrier, the owner's name where one is identifiable, social profiles, ratings, reviews, and the full business profile. One lead is one delivered, fully verified business: 100 on the free plan, and 15,000, 65,000, or 240,000 a month on paid.

Exports go to Close, GoHighLevel, Google Sheets, or emailed CSV, Excel, or JSON — matched on a stable Google business identifier, so a re-run updates in place instead of duplicating and never overwrites what you created by hand. Runs schedule once, daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly to any destination; there's a REST API on every plan including free, plus an MCP server with seven tools for Claude, ChatGPT developer mode, Cursor, or any MCP client. The quick-start guide shows the output shape in minutes, and the free plan lets you diff it against a Places pull on your own niche.

Google Places API pricing FAQ

How many free Google Places API calls do I get?

There's a permanent monthly allotment rather than a trial: as of August 2026, 10,000 calls for Essentials SKUs, 5,000 for Pro, and 1,000 for Enterprise, counted separately per SKU and reset monthly. Billing still has to be enabled on the project. On the search-with-fields approach above, 1,000 free Enterprise requests cover up to 20,000 place records a month before deduplication.

What do 10,000 businesses cost?

On the search-with-fields path, about 500 requests — inside the 1,000 free Enterprise calls, so effectively $0, then $1.75 per 1,000 thereafter. On the Place Details path, 10,000 detail calls at $20 per 1,000 is $200 list, roughly $180 after the free allotment. Add your grid-search overlap rate to either figure.

Does the Google Places API return email addresses?

No. There's no email field at any SKU tier. Places returns a website URI, and turning that into a mailbox is a separate crawl that yields nothing for businesses without a site.

Can I store Google Places results in my CRM?

Place IDs, yes, indefinitely. Other Content falls under the terms' temporary-caching limit of 30 consecutive calendar days, alongside restrictions on mass download, database creation, and redistribution. That's a summary, not legal advice — read the current Maps Platform terms, and ask a lawyer rather than a blog if you sell or hand on the list.

Is Google Maps API pricing cheaper than a lead-data provider?

Per raw business record, clearly yes — and it should be, because the two sell different units. Places sells listing content; a lead product sells a contactable business. Price one real campaign both ways, all the way to a contact you'd genuinely dial, counting the crawler, the email verifier, the phone lookup, and your own hours. Compare on that denominator, not the headline rate.