Is It compulsory to enable billing account by June 11, 2018 through credit card information to continue to access Google Maps API?

Question

Per Google,

"Beginning on June 11, 2018, you’ll need to enable billing with a credit card and have a valid API key for all projects. This will give you the ability to scale easily with less downtime and fewer performance issues. In addition, we’re simplifying our 18 individual APIs into three products: Maps, Routes, and Places."

Source

However, Google do not say anywhere whether it's a hard stop or not. What if I don't enable billing account and do not add credit card information. Will I still be able to access Google APIs such as map, directions, geocode after June 11, 2018?

Solution

For projects that existed prior to June 11, 2018

According to the Google Maps Platform technical support, a billing account without any credit card information will be created for each project without billing account. This means that the API calls will still succeed, as long as they fit within the free tier of $200 per month. If your application goes over the 200$ free tier, the billing account will be closed, and API calls will start failing. The only option after that to reopen billing account is entering the credit card information.

For project that were created after June 11, 2018

You must enable a billing account in order to use Google Maps APIs.

Comments

[geocodezip]

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is about terms of use (legal issues), not coding.

[xomena]

This is question for Google maps support team, StackOverflow is not right place to ask about billing.

[DanielaB67]

I was also looking for an answer about Google account billing and they are sending us to ask the question in Stackoverflow community :) I will send my question to Google, but the tech support of SO should know that this is the case. How can we do anything about it? :) developers.google.com/maps/documentation/embed/support

[xomena]

Updated answer to make it clear that it referred to projects that existed before Google Maps Platform launch. All newly created projects will require billing account.