Published 2026-08-04 · reference numbers, verify before budgeting
Both providers advertise a "generous free tier," and both pricing pages are true and misleading at the same time. Google Maps Platform gives every account a flat $200/month credit that gets spent across whichever SKUs you call — map loads, geocoding, places, directions, all drawing from the same pool. Mapbox instead gives each product its own free allowance — 50,000 map loads, 100,000 geocoding requests — that don't compete with each other. Those are two different shapes of "free," and which one wins depends entirely on how many products you mix. Let's put one real feature through both.
A store-locator feature inside a mid-size retail or logistics app: 150,000 interactive map loads a month (customers opening the map to find a location) and 20,000 geocoding lookups (turning a typed address into coordinates so the map can center on it). That's a real feature, not an edge case — any delivery app, real-estate listing site or franchise locator sits in roughly this range.
Google prices dynamic map loads at ~$7 per 1,000 and geocoding at ~$5 per 1,000, then applies the $200 monthly credit against the combined total:
| SKU | Usage | Rate | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dynamic map loads (JS) | 150,000 | $7 / 1,000 | $1,050 |
| Geocoding | 20,000 | $5 / 1,000 | $100 |
| Subtotal | $1,150 | ||
| − $200 monthly credit | −$200 | ||
| Total | $950 / month |
Prices are reference estimates, August 2026. Report outdated price →
That $200 credit sounds like a lot until you remember it's shared. At $7 per 1,000 loads, it covers roughly 28,500 map loads and nothing else — on a feature doing 150,000 loads, the credit barely dents the bill.
Mapbox's free tier is per-product, so map loads and geocoding each get their own runway before billing starts:
| Product | Usage | Free / month | Billable | Rate | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Map loads (GL JS) | 150,000 | 50,000 | 100,000 | $5 / 1,000 | $500 |
| Geocoding | 20,000 | 100,000 | 0 | $5 / 1,000 | $0 |
| Total | $500 / month |
The 20,000 geocoding lookups don't cost a cent on Mapbox — they sit well inside the 100,000 free allowance. On Google the same 20,000 lookups add $100, because they're competing with the map loads for the same $200 pool. The store-locator feature above runs $950 on Google Maps and $500 on Mapbox — a $450/month, 47% gap, for functionally the same feature.
This isn't a "always use Mapbox" conclusion. Google Maps has better global coverage in some regions, Street View, and a UI users already recognize — Places autocomplete in particular is hard to beat for address-entry UX. If your volumes are genuinely low — under ~28,000 combined SKU calls a month — the $200 credit can mean $0 bill on Google, and you'd pay nothing on Mapbox either since both free tiers cover that range. The gap only opens up once you're mixing multiple SKUs at real traffic, which is exactly what most production apps with a map feature end up doing.
Don't budget Google Maps by the $200 credit alone — divide it by how many different SKUs your feature actually calls, because they all draw from the same pool. For a mixed map-loads-plus-geocoding feature at 150k/20k monthly volume, Mapbox's per-product free tiers and lower map-load rate landed at roughly half the Google Maps bill in our sizing. Run your own numbers — traffic mix changes this fast — with the Google Maps SKU cost calculator or compare providers directly on the maps API pricing page. It's the same lesson as hidden API costs that double your bill: a shared credit pool hides cost the same way an unmetered free tier does — until you check which SKUs are actually splitting it.
Figures are reference estimates (August 2026). Google Maps Platform pricing and the $200 monthly credit, and Mapbox's per-product free tiers, change without notice — always confirm current rates on each provider's official pricing page before budgeting.