GOOGLE'S NEW MAPS API BUSINESS MODEL BREAKS SOME EXISTING GEOCODER INSTALLS - May 3rd, 2019

If you're having trouble with a GeoCoding application that worked perfectly in the past, Daniel Louwe at Interactive Tools may have the answer. He said: Due to some recent changes (August 2018) by Google (https://developers.google.com/maps/billing/important-updates), the info in the plugin readme.txt is no longer 100% accurate. We've been looking into the changes and will be updating our documentation with the next plugin release, but for now, I can share some of this new information with you here. Google now provides a $200/month credit towards their API services. This translates to 40,000 geocoding requests per month (https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/pricing/sheet/), which should be sufficient for most projects. Accessing the API does now require setting up a billing account with a CC number, but the credit will be applied automatically each month. If you are at all concerned about exceeding the credit, it's possible to set a hard cap on API usage using quota limits (https://cloud.google.com/apis/docs/capping-api-usage). These limits are per-day, so for the Geocoding API that would work out to roughly a "1300 requests per day" quota limit to stay under $200. Budget alerts are also available (https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/budgets) to get notifications about overall billing account usage. To get an existing API key up and running with the new system, you can try checking out this link: https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/user-guide/ and clicking on the Transition Tool. This tool will help identify any steps you'll need to take to reactivate the API. Alternately, here are updated instructions for setting up a new key: Visit https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/get-api-key Click 'Get Started' Select 'Maps' and click 'Continue' Click the drop-down to either select an existing project or create a new one, 'Next' Follow the steps to create/enable a billing account for this project. Accept the prompt to enable the Maps API. Copy the API key and paste it into the plugin in the field for $GLOBALS['GEOCODER_GOOGLE_API_KEY'], and click 'Done' (Optional) Click 'Secure Credentials' Under Application Restrictions, select HTTP Referrers Add the domain for the website(s) this API key will be used on (for example localhost, example.com, 8.8.8.8) Click API restrictions Select the Geocoding API from the dropdown Click Save

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