Geocoding APIs compared: Pricing, free tiers and terms of use

Summary

Author's note This article was originally published on Superface blog before the pivot to agentic tooling platform and is republished here with company's permission. I am no longer working with geocoding APIs and the content of this article may be outdated. Geocoding is the process of converting an address to geolocation coordinates (latitude and longitude). Reverse geocoding is the opposite: assigning a street address to the given coordinates. Examples of geocoding include: Obvious ones, like finding a location on a map or displaying an address of a selected location. Visualization of customer data. Working with coordinates stored in photos. Local search, such as displaying events or restaurants in the user’s proximity or within a city radius. How do you build this feature? The easiest way is to use a geocoding API, which often includes reverse geocoding and address data cleaning functions as well. The good news is that there isn’t a shortage of geocoding API providers to choose from. The bad news is that you have to pick one. Which is why we’re here: to help you decide on the most suitable geocoding API for your project. Comparison criteria In this article, we will look at the pricing model, and terms of use: Pricing: Most geocoding API providers have a volume-based pricing. So, we will look at pricing tiers and price per API request. Free tier: Typically there is a free or trial tier with a limited number of requests or limited functionality. This can be useful for testing the API or even keeping your costs low for personal or low-budget projects. Data terms of use: It’s essential to know if there are any limitations about the data usage: Does the provider require displaying an attribution? Is it even okay to use the data for commercial use? In the follow-up articles, we will also explore additional criteria: Accuracy: It doesn’t matter whether the API is cheap if the results are useless. So, we will do a head-to-head comparison of various queries and compare the...