Google Charges through the roof!

  • So i have a community based website using places to let people know what restaurants are now open. I recently got an invoice from Google for $12,000 (yes twelve thousand) we are a small town and i am only getting about 1500 hits so i am not sure why but Google says i need to ask the developer about how the calls are being made. With billing changes recently i am sure others are getting billed when it used to be free to use. Any insights how are you dealing with this with your own sits using places?

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  • I am running into this same issue for our website. We are getting charged by Google because it is pulling all the API data and we really only want to make use of one field which is “Hours”. It would be great if there were a way from the plugin options after install to restrict what is being pulled from Google’s API. Allow the user to choose via a checkbox which fields or just one field within the plugin. I am sure like winthropweb above this is impacting a number of websites that use this plugin because it is a great resource and helps these organizations a great deal. However, these are orgs or non-profits and they can’t afford this type of billing from Google.

    • This reply was modified 6 years, 1 month ago by sbates.
    Plugin Author Gary Kovar

    (@binarygary)

    My apologies. This plugin had not been updated in quite a while as I’ve been busy with quite a few other things. In that time, google dramatically increased their rates.
    For now a bandaid fix is available in version 2.1.2 until I can find time to dig in further.

    In your functions.php in your theme add:

    add_filter( ‘wp_places_transient’, ‘wp_places_update_transient’, 10, 1 );
wp_places_update_transient( $time ) {
// return a value in seconds for how long to cache.
return 86400; // one day
return 604800 // one week
}

    Return however long you’d like the transient to exist. This is not full proof, but better than checking every minute if a place is open.

    Thank you Gary! That is awesome! I will get back to you and let you know how it works out. thank you so much for helping us out so quickly!

    -Saundra

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