What we shipped this month: geocoding, IP, time zone and more
A roundup of recent work across the API: new compatibility hosts, faster time zone and elevation lookups, dashboard features, and clearer quota visibility.
Prepaid credit and Unlimited packages, explained
There are exactly two ways to pay for My Geocode usage beyond the free allowances, and both are simple enough to explain in a sentence each. Prepaid credit costs €0.0001 a request. An Unlimited package costs €50 a month and removes the per-request cost entirely.
We build and run a geocoding API. That is the whole company, and our pricing reflects it: no tiered plans that bundle a handful of endpoints together at different rates, no separate pricing sheet for compatibility hosts, and no negotiation required to find out what something costs. Every endpoint and every drop-in host costs the same, whether it is /v1/forward, /v1/timezone, or a call shaped for Google Maps Platform.
Prepaid credit suits usage that is real but modest, or usage that varies a lot from day to day. You buy credit ahead of time, and each request beyond your free allowance draws it down at €0.0001 a request. Since a bulk or batch call counts each item individually, the same rate applies whether a request is a single lookup or one item inside a call carrying a thousand of them. X-Credits-Remaining on every response shows exactly what is left, so running low is never a surprise discovered mid-month.
An Unlimited package suits usage that is heavy enough that per-request billing would be harder to reason about. For €50 a month, every request past the free allowance is simply covered, on every endpoint and every compatibility host, with no per-request meter to watch. It is a flat number that is easy to budget against regardless of how traffic moves week to week.
Both options sit on top of the free tier, not instead of it. Every address still gets 2,500 free requests a day with no key at all, counted per network, and every key adds its own separate 2,500 free requests a day. Prepaid credit or an Unlimited package only comes into play once those allowances are used up on a given day.
Payment for either option can be made by PayPal, cryptocurrency, or bank transfer, whichever is easiest on your end. There is no requirement to commit to one payment method permanently. An account can switch from prepaid credit to an Unlimited package, or the other way around, as usage patterns change.
Every key gets a free daily allowance. Past it, requests draw on prepaid credit or are covered by an Unlimited package. Every response tells you where you stand in its headers, so choosing between the two is less about guessing and more about looking at a few days of X-Credits-Remaining and deciding which shape fits. Full pricing details are at /pricing/.