Guide
Google Maps Scraper vs the Official Google Places API
Updated September 25, 20267 min read
A reasonable question when evaluating Google Maps scrapers: why not just use Google's own API? It's a fair instinct. The answer is that "official" doesn't mean "simpler" or "cheaper" here -- it means a different, more technical path to a narrower result.
Quick answer
Google's Places API (Text Search / Nearby Search) starts at $32 per 1,000 calls, with each call returning at most 20 results and no email address, ever. Covering a real area means many overlapping calls, plus separate Place Details calls for phone numbers, plus your own code to dedupe and export it. A purpose-built scraper like Maplist gets you the same publicly visible listing data, with emails matched, for a fraction of the cost and no API key required.
What the Places API actually costs
As of 2026, Text Search and Nearby Search are billed at $32 per 1,000 calls for the first 100,000 calls a month, stepping down at higher volume (down to $2.40 per 1,000 past 5 million calls). Requesting fields like ratings or opening hours moves you to a more expensive tier ($35 per 1,000); reviews or photos move you to the most expensive tier ($40 per 1,000). There's a free monthly allotment (currently 5,000 calls for this tier), which sounds generous until you look at what one call actually returns.
The 20-results-per-call problem
Each Text Search or Nearby Search call returns at most 20 results, regardless of how many matching businesses actually exist in the area you searched. To get full coverage of, say, "plumbers in Denver," you can't run one call -- you need to subdivide the area into a grid and run a call per cell, then dedupe the overlap, or you'll simply miss most of the businesses that exist. That's before you've paid for a single phone number: names and addresses come from Search calls, but phone numbers and websites usually require a separate Place Details call per business, billed on top.
No emails, ever
Google's API doesn't expose email addresses under any tier or price -- it's simply not data Google collects for a listing. If you want a list with matched emails, you'd need to build a separate enrichment step yourself: scraping each business's website, or using a third-party enrichment service.
When the official API is actually the right call
To be fair to it: if you're building a consumer-facing product that needs live, authoritative place data inside your own app -- a store locator, a delivery radius checker -- the Places API is the right and intended tool, and Google's terms are built around that use case. It's just a poor fit for "I want a lead list for a cold outreach campaign," which is a different job with a much better-suited (and cheaper) set of tools.
FAQ
Is the Google Places API cheaper than a scraper?
Usually not, once you account for what it actually takes to build a full lead list with it. Text Search and Nearby Search cost $32 per 1,000 calls at the base tier (dropping at high volume), and each call returns at most 20 results and no email address. Getting full coverage of an area and adding contact details requires many more calls than the raw request count suggests.
Does the Places API include emails?
No. Google's API returns what's on the listing -- name, address, phone in some cases, ratings, hours -- but never an email address, since Google doesn't collect or expose that. Any tool claiming email data from the "official" API is doing separate enrichment on top of it, same as a scraper would.
Is it more legitimate to use Google's own API instead of a scraper?
It's a reasonable instinct, but "official" doesn't mean simpler or cheaper -- it means a Google Cloud billing account, an API key, usage caps, and building your own tooling around the results. Third-party scrapers like Maplist pull the same publicly visible listing data through a finished product instead of a raw API.
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