F*** me. A 14x price increase?! https://mapsplatform.googleblog.com/2018/05/introducing-google-maps-platform.html https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/pricing/sheet/ Most sites use dynamic maps - currently free for 25,000 map loads a day and $0.50 per thousand thereafter. TL;DR: If you get more than 28,000 impressions per month on pages with maps, you're going to have to get your wallet out. To the tune of $7 per thousand.
Wow! I can see a lot of people will have to reconsider their business models. Some of those CPM charges are way higher than you could realistically expect a map-type page to generate in ad revenue. Perhaps this might be the way to go? https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Google_Maps_Example This might be of some help... http://mapstraction.com/
There are lots of potential options, but all mean developer time. And many are more expensive than Google Maps used to be. Here.com and Mapbox for example.
The TomTom Maps APIs are a high-quality alternative with a very affordable pricing model. You always get 2,500 transactions per day for free and additional transactions are charged at max. $0,5/1000 transactions (or even less depending on your volumes and usage). Check out some examples here: https://developer.tomtom.com/maps-sdk-web/functional-examples More info about the pricing model can be found here: https://developer.tomtom.com/store/maps-api P.S. I'm working for TomTom so feel free to reach out to me directly in case you have more questions.
We've used TomTom before, but I'm not actually a fan, sorry Gregory. Leaflet + Thunderforest or Stadiamaps looks the most likely option for us right now.