we're working on a site which uses Google maps API (free version) to find long and lat from addresses. It does this for several different events and has started failing on a regular basis. The developers are saying Google have just reduced the number of daily calls to something like 2500 but they can't get a proper number from either Google or the forums.
Yes there are lots of ways we can reduce the dependency and/or spread the load, but does anyone happen to know the actual nunber of calls per 24 hours its now limited to? Worst case it would be nice to send the first n queries via the api and then fallback on something less cost effective until we can do something cleverer, but we're not sure what n should be right now. Unfortunately the next 6 weeks are the busiest period so it needs a quick fix.
Cheers
I stayed away from map apis because of the daily limits. Though Yahoo did bump mine to 10k or somesuch I just never trusted them enough to build pages around them.
Looking through my geo-related bookmarks, it appears the yahoo api has forked and now there's a 'placefinder'
http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/placefinder/
docs say 50,000 calls per day