Google Places API Pricing: What Scraping 10,000 Leads Actually Costs

If you're technical, building your own lead scraper on the Google Places API is an obvious thought. It's the sanctioned route, the data is current, and you avoid a subscription.

Then you get the first bill, and it's roughly four times what you estimated. The reason is almost always the same, and it's worth understanding before you write any code.

Prices below are the published figures as of August 2026 and are quoted in US dollars. Google restructured this pricing in March 2025, so anything you read from before then is describing a different model — check the current pricing page before committing to a build.

The Structure Changed in March 2025

Two things worth knowing if you're working from older information.

The $200 monthly credit that used to cover casual usage is gone. It was replaced with free monthly call allowances per SKU — up to 10,000 free calls per product per month, with the exact allowance depending on which tier you're on.

And the original Places API was designated legacy at the same time. New builds use Places API (New), which prices by SKU tier — Essentials, Pro, and Enterprise — rather than by endpoint.

The Trap: Two Calls Per Lead

Here's the thing that wrecks most estimates.

A Text Search returns places. It does not return the business's website or phone number. To get those, you make a separate Place Details call for each individual business.

So you don't pay once per lead. You pay once per *page* of search results, and then once per lead on top. For a thousand leads that's roughly fifty search calls and a thousand detail calls — and the detail calls are the expensive part by an enormous margin.

The Second Trap: Your Fields Are Enterprise Tier

Place Details is priced by which fields you request, and the tiers are not intuitive.

Place Details Essentials covers address components, location, and viewport, at $5.00 per 1,000 requests. Place Details Pro adds display name, business status, opening hours, and types, at $17.00 per 1,000.

The fields you actually want for lead generation — websiteUri, nationalPhoneNumber, internationalPhoneNumber, rating, and userRatingCount — all sit in Place Details Enterprise, at $20.00 per 1,000 requests.

That's the whole ballgame. Every field that makes a record useful as a lead is in the most expensive tier. There's no configuration that gets you a website URL at the Essentials price.

Working Through 10,000 Leads

Assume 10,000 businesses, and that you want the name, website, phone, rating, and review count for each.

The search step needs roughly 500 Text Search requests, since results come back in pages of up to 20 and each page request bills separately. At Text Search Pro pricing of $32.00 per 1,000, that's about $16.

There's a genuine optimisation available here: Text Search Essentials (IDs Only) returns just place identifiers and carries an unlimited free cap. If your workflow is search-then-detail anyway, you don't need the search response to contain anything but IDs, and the search step becomes free.

The details step needs 10,000 Place Details Enterprise requests at $20.00 per 1,000, which is $200.

So the total is around $216 with a Pro search, or around $200 if you take the IDs-only route. Before free allowances, that's roughly £155-£170 depending on the exchange rate.

Note the ratio: the search step is about 7% of the cost and the details step is about 93%. Optimising your search strategy saves you almost nothing. Reducing detail calls is the only lever that matters.

The Costs That Don't Appear in That Number

Three things the arithmetic above leaves out.

Speculative searches still bill. Search for "marketing agencies in Sheffield", decide the results aren't right, and you've paid for the search and any details you pulled. Exploratory work has a real unit cost, which changes how you'd design the workflow — you'd cache aggressively and think before searching.

There are still no email addresses. The Places API does not return them, ever. Every lead you've now paid roughly two cents for still needs an email found from somewhere else, which is either a separate enrichment API with its own per-lookup cost, or your own crawler with its own engineering time.

Engineering time. Pagination, rate limits, retry handling, caching, field masks, and keeping up with Google's SKU changes. That's the cost that dwarfs the API bill for most small teams.

When Building It Yourself Makes Sense

If you're doing very high volume, have engineering capacity, and need the pipeline embedded in your own product, build it. At scale the API cost per lead is genuinely low and you get complete control.

If you need a few thousand leads with email addresses and no engineering project, the arithmetic favours a tool — mostly because of the enrichment gap and the maintenance, not the API fees. The comparison of Google Maps scraping tools covers which options use the official API and which scrape the front end, which matters for whether the thing keeps working.

LeadSnipe runs on the official Places API, caches search results and place details to avoid re-billing identical lookups, and adds the email enrichment step the API can't provide. The scraping walkthrough covers the workflow end to end.