What Google Maps costs

The short answer

One workbook on its own Google Maps key stays inside Google's free monthly allowance. It only goes past it if you set a Monthly Google Budget in its Settings.

Running more than one workbook (say, one for each Time To Pet account)? Give each its own key in its own Google Cloud project. Each workbook counts only its own use, so two workbooks sharing one key could together go past the free allowance.

What Google charges for, if you set a budget

If you ever set a budget, this is what Google charges for, separately from anything you pay me, billed to you directly.

Looking up your addresses costs nothing in practice: it happens once per client, ever, and Google's free monthly allowance covers about 10,000 of them.

Real drive times are the one to understand. Google prices them per pair of stops, so the cost grows with the square of how many different addresses you visit, not with how many visits you do.

• A solo sitter or a small team visiting up to about 60 different addresses a month stays inside the free allowance and pays nothing.
• Around 150 addresses a month it is usually somewhere between nothing and $40.
• A large operation visiting 250 or more different addresses a month can run from $50 to $300 a month depending on how much the schedule varies, and a very large one more than that.

You do not have to buy them

Route Companion can learn your roads from a small sample, a few hundred real drive times that fit inside Google's free allowance at any size, and then use that for every leg without buying any more. It does this by default: once it has learned your roads it stops buying from Google on its own, and your Maps key carries on looking up new clients' addresses.

If you want real drive times on every leg anyway, set Real Drive Times to Always and a Monthly Google Budget in Settings. Without one it never spends past the free allowance: it stops buying for the rest of the month and keeps planning with what it has.

Keep an eye on it

Either way, Route Companion shows you this month's Google usage in its settings and warns you on the route page before you reach the free allowance. Google lets you set a budget alert on your own account, which I would do on day one whatever size you are.

Set the alert. Watch the first month in Google's own billing dashboard, which is always the final word. If the number surprises you, tell me.