It's a good motivation to improve our usage of their APIs and I'm sure that I can bring down those cost estimates (by reducing API usage overall and by switching some to use the static map API - although the caps on resolution gave us problems with that in the past).
We have a lot of customers in real estate, and would love to set you up with something that would be significantly less than $25k. These situations are why we started the company. :)
I think our tiers work very well for the real estate space overall.
Initial work on reducing load looks very promising though (lazy loading only when users scroll as far as the map on property pages, pooling map instances/dom elements and reusing them across a React app so that they're not recreated) - both things I really should have been doing already anyway. I guess that's part of the motivation for the change - even if I don't pay anything, I'm now costing Google less.