Google Places API vs scraping: costs, limits and legality
By Doug Nielsen, Product Manager · Updated · first published
Use the Places API to build features inside software; scrape Google Maps when you need a complete, exportable prospect list with emails.
Scraping is what our Google Maps data extractor does; its page compares it with the Places API on emails, depth and cost.
Key takeaways
- Both cap results per search, so a city-wide pull means splitting by area.
- No Places API tier returns emails: Google doesn't hold them.
- The API bills per request; Hubertino, per business delivered.
- Maps Platform storage limits are contractual, a separate question from legality.
On this page8
Places API vs scraping, side by side
| Places API | Hubertino (scraper) | |
|---|---|---|
| Results per search | 60, in pages of 20 (historically) | Roughly 100–120; a city is split into ZIP-code searches |
| Email address | None: Google doesn't hold one | From the business's own website, where one is published |
| Other fields | Name, address, coordinates, phone, website, rating, review count, hours, place ID | The same listing fields plus social profiles, 38 columns in all |
| Reviews per place | At most 5 | Up to 2,000 with the reviews scraper, 1 credit per review |
| Cost | Per request, by SKU, after a free monthly allowance per SKU | 1 credit per business delivered, emails included; unused reservations auto-refunded |
| Terms | Maps Platform terms restrict storing and exporting beyond limited caching | Google's Terms of Service restrict automated collection; the XLSX or CSV is yours to keep |
| Code needed | Yes: an API key and requests | No: a dashboard, or the REST API if you want one |
Result limits
Both cap a single search far below the real count, so a market-wide pull means many searches split by area, as ZIP-code splitting does, and on the API every extra request adds to the bill.
- results per Places API search, historically, across pages
- 60
- places, roughly, per Google Maps search
- 100–120
Fields you get and fields you don't
The API's place data is better structured than anything scraped. Email is the gap: you'd still crawl each business's website for it, the harder half of the job (see the email-enrichment guide).
Cost: per request vs per business delivered
The API bills per request, by SKU, after a free monthly allowance per SKU: cheap for an app looking up a few places per session, expensive for pulling tens of thousands of rows once. Our Google Places API cost calculator prices a month's volume from Google's current price list.
In Hubertino, 1 credit is 1 business delivered, with the website's email and socials included and unused reservations auto-refunded.
Get the whole list in one job
- 100 free credits
- No card required
Terms and risk
Maps Platform terms restrict what you may store and for how long, and generally don't contemplate exporting place data into a marketing database. That restriction is contractual, between you and Google, and separate from whether collecting public business information is lawful where you are.
Collecting business details that are publicly listed is generally lawful in the US and EU, but Google's Terms of Service restrict automated collection from Google Maps. What you then do with the data is regulated in its own right: in the UK and EU, GDPR covers keeping any record that identifies a person, and outreach falls under CAN-SPAM in the US, PECR in the UK, § 7 UWG in Germany, CASL in Canada and the Spam Act in Australia. This isn't legal advice; our legal guide goes into more detail.
Which to pick
| You're building | Use |
|---|---|
| A feature for your users: autocomplete, a store locator, a map inside your product | The Places API: it's designed and supported for this, under terms you already agreed to |
| A prospect or market list | A scraper: you need completeness, export and emails, and the API delivers none of the three |
| Both | Both, which is common and fine: product surfaces run on the API, the sales team's territory lists come from a scrape |
Common questions
Is the Places API's data more accurate?
Can I get 5,000 restaurants in a city from the API?
Written by
Doug Nielsen, Product Manager
Doug works on Hubertino; the guides on this site are published under his name. Last updated .