What's being missed here is that this is, in some ways, a return to normal for Google Maps. Google only introduced pay-as-you-go Maps API access in September 2015[1]. Before that, you could get 2,500 free per day. If you needed more, you had to sign a $10-20,000/yr enterprise contract. That was it. There was no pay-as-you-go access. If you needed just 5,000 or 15,000 a day, you were SOL. (That's a big reason we launched Geocod.io in the first place, because we found ourselves in that unserved middle of the market.)

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/01/google-introduces-uncompli...