If you’re a Premium Plan customer whose licence expires after June 11, 2018 there is a risk you will be paying twice for the same service if your licence key is not correctly implemented in your code.

For some customers there will be a period of up to 15 months where the old Google Maps API Premium Plan and new Google Maps Platform pricing models will be running concurrently.

The risk for Premium Plan customers is that if their licence key is not implemented in all calls to the APIs they will have pre-paid for their usage, but also be billed on a monthly basis under the new plan.

What is your licence key?

Your licence key was sent to your primary email account at the time of booking your licence with Google through NGIS.

The key pieces of information like your client ID and your Premium Plan  API key are included in your welcome letter, which is sent out upon licence provisioning.

Your client ID starts with ‘gme-‘ and usually ends with your company or project name (eg. ‘gme-company’) and your API key is a long string of letters and numbers. If you’re unsure what this looks like in practice, watch our onboarding video [link to Dion’s video].

How do I know if my code is right?

All of your calls to the API should include your credentials from your welcome letter. You can review these by inspecting your code and looking for the credentials.

Ifyou’re not sure if your calls to the API contain the key in production, you can download the free Google Maps API checker from the Chrome Extension Library. When you’re on the page with your map, this free tool shows a simple colour coded pin icon to indicate when calls have the relevant keys included.

Transitioning to the new Google Maps Platform

When the time comes to switch from the Google Maps API Premium Plan to Google Maps Platform, you will not need to change your Premium Plan credentials as the old ones will be mapped to the new system in Google’s back end. It will ensure that the old account details are connected to your new billing account for a seamless swap over.

Getting help

​If you are interesting in saving money with Google Maps by billing through a partner or improving your code, get in touch with our Google Maps technology partner, Liveli.