Tiles or map loads: two metering models, one bill
Google meters interactive maps per session, most others meter per tile. The models produce wildly different bills for the same product, and which one favours you depends entirely on how people use your map.
Two providers can quote what looks like the same price and hand you invoices that differ by a factor of five, because they are counting different things.
Per session
A map load — a session — covers one map instance for as long as the user interacts with it. Panning and zooming for ten minutes costs the same as a single glance. This is generous for exploratory maps and expensive for pages where the map is decoration.
Per tile
A tile is a 256 or 512 pixel square. A desktop viewport is roughly twelve tiles; every zoom level fetches a fresh set. A user who pans across a city might pull four hundred. But a page that renders one static view and never moves pulls twelve, once, and then serves them from cache for a week.
Which one you want
- Store locator, one view, no interaction: per tile wins, often by 10×
- Fleet dashboard open all day, constant panning: per session wins
- Mobile app with an aggressive tile cache: per tile wins again, because cached tiles never bill
- Anything embedded in an email or a PDF: use static images and stop thinking about it
The practical advice is unglamorous: instrument your map before you choose a provider. Count tile requests for a week behind whatever you use today. The number will surprise you, and it is the only input that makes the comparison real.