I'm looking into ProMaps for a new project and trying to understand the API pricing from Google but I'm not clear enough on the terminology to feel comfortable with what I'm reading. The user would be working with about 15-20 addresses across a handful of technicians for each business day. They would want to see the route for each technician's work orders and then adjust those routes manually. I'm assuming that this size of business/project wouldn't register a cost beyond the $200 monthly credit from Google.

Any idea of pricing for a system similar to this? Or do you have a benchmark for prior implementations?

Hi Jason,

That's a great question!

With Google's new pricing on their API, it's a bit difficult to accurately predict the amount of credit that will be used for each ProMaps solution, but let's take a look at the things in ProMaps that will use the API:

Loading the map: Each time the regular map is loaded, including when filters are applied, the "Refresh Map" button is clicked, or the layout is refreshed, will be considered a "Map Load" from Google. These are priced at 0.007 USD per each for the first 100,000, so it would take 28,572 map loads to exceed the $200 monthly credit.

Loading the Route map: Depending on whether you have more than 10 waypoints/properties selected or not, loading the route map will cost either 0.005 or 0.01 USD per each for the first 100,000 loads. This means 20,000-40,000 loads of the Route map could exceed the $200 monthly credit.

GeoCoding or Constraining Since we need to get the geolocation of each property in your database, we use the GeoCode API to retrieve that from the address. Each of these calls costs 0.005 USD. Additionally, any time you do a find in the constrain map, we use the Distance API, which also costs 0.005 USD per each.

Since all of these calls to the different APIs add up, you can see why it's difficult to predict the usage based on the number of users in the solution. It's really something that would become more apparent after a few months of use. It does seem that a "handful" of technicians would have a real hard time exceeding tens of thousands of map loads and other calls to the API to break past the $200 monthly credit.

Another thing to consider with this is that you can set Quotas in your Google account that limit the API usage so that you'll never exceed the $200 credit. The result of this, though, is that further calls to the API beyond the quota will fail and the map will no longer load. Details on this can be found in the "Manage Your Cost of Use" section of Google's docs here: https://developers.google.com/maps/docu ... nd-billing

I hope that helps! Let us know if you have any further questions.

Regards,
KC

Thanks, KC. This is really helpful.

These guys have 6 technicians so I do think we're safe.