Built a listing site recently with an average of 100 – 200 listings and a displayed map on each listing pulling from an ACF field.
After hours of reading through and implementing a solution to render the map and marker using a shortcode – I found that ACF maps require the following permissions:
Geolocation, Places, Javascript, Location, and another one (too tired to log in and confirm the 5th Maps API permission).
After a month of the site being live and checking in Google’s API, I found the bill is already near $70 for the month of March alone with 5,500+ requests pulled – the site’s traffic is average 25 – 50 visits per day.
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**Checks math**: 50 visits at 1 request per visitor x 30 days = 1,500 requests to API (if being charged for each permission request (5 enabled in Google Credential settings) requests then that’s 7,500.
Anyone else using ACF maps or Google Maps API and seeing higher than expected costs?
Is there a fixed price solution other than Google that allows for adding a map to a listing/product template and pulling the address value from a custom field?
Curious to hear if I’m alone or if this is a wider-spread thing to factor in going forward…
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Have you locked down your API key, as recommended by Google? The Google Maps API Console website tells you how many visitors are accessing the API – correlate that with your GA traffic.
You could look into MapBox. I believe they have volume commitment deals.
That being said, you should be receiving a $200 monthly credit from Google for anything that falls under the maps platform which is equal to roundly 28k maploads.