After benefiting game developers this March by introducing industry solutions for game studios to allow them to create game worlds based on the real world by using Google Maps data, Google is now all set to benefit developers of location-based apps by streamlining their APIs and announcing a new Google Maps Platform.
To begin with, Google has sorted 18 individual APIs into three core products- Maps, Routes, and Places. This will make it easy for developers to locate and explore these APIs to add new features to their apps and sites. And the updated APIs shall work with existing codes, doing away with the hassle of re-coding.
The second simplification has been made to the pricing policies to gain access to the core APIs. To make things easier, Google has merged Standard and Premium plans to form one pay-as-you-go pricing plan for the core products. This new plan, apart from providing developers with the first $200 of monthly usage for free, has also done away with annual, up-front commitments, termination fees, or usage limits to ensure that customers pay only for the services they use each month, after having crossed the initial $200 limit. Google is also providing free customer services and integrating products with Google Cloud Platform Console to make it easier for developers to track their usage, manage projects, and discover new innovative Cloud products.
Starting on June 11th, users shall require a valid API key and a Google Cloud Platform billing account to access the core products. Once the users enable billing, they shall become entitled to the monthly cap of $200; and to make things more beneficial, Google’s plan intends to scale with users as they face business growth or usage spikes. And this scaling can be done without thinking about capacity, reliability, or performance, owing to Google Maps’ global infrastructure. Maps shall also continue to partner with Google programs that bring products to nonprofits, startups, crisis response, and news media organizations, to scale hundreds of thousands of organizations and more countries around the world.
