I actually talked to Google yesterday. Minimum tier is 100k per day at $17.5k per year. Very fair price (If you think that is expensive, then you clearly do not work in commercial GIS, where licensing of software and data is insanely expensive). At the same time, they force you to use the data on a Google Map component (yes, even for the paid accounts), and while their api is acceptable, their js map control is severely lacking in features compared to something like leaflet, openlayers, or esri's js component. This may have very well been simply an arbitrary decision, but it has the effect of snuffing out any small companies or start ups that want to use their apis to build new, innovative applications. Considering the big few companies in this space bought up just about all the data companies that originally compiled the underlying data, this seems completely anti-competitive to me. I am not saying they should give it away for free, but there should definitely be some smaller paid plans with more open terms of use, considering that Google and the couple other competitors basically just purchased a cartel together over the last decade.

    their js map control is severely lacking in features compared to something like leaflet, openlayers, or esri's js component. 

I work on the Google Maps API. I'd love to hear more about what features you're missing.

Honestly, I had to take a look at in depth to respond, since it has been a while since I looked at the google api in depth. What I still notice is that Openlayers and the esri allow for a lot more service types. You have KML and GeoRSS, which are fine, but do not seem to support many other of the more common formats out of the box such as Arcserver services,WMS, or WFS (which are probably the 3 most common types in the GIS world). I have seen some workarounds for these, but they seem hacky and slow in the implementations I have seen. I do not have a big problem with KML, but I cannot always change what format a 3rd party serves a map as.

The other thing that appears to be lacking is front end geoprocessing. With esri at least, you can do quite a bit of geometry manipulation out of the box. This can be extremely useful for realtime data visualizations, as starting up a new map service is often a bottleneck with any of the backend platforms. If you can just render the new layer on the client, you save loads of time.

My last issue might just be a lack of understanding, but from what I have seen of the backend offering that google maps enterprise offers, it is missing some major features. For one, the documentation is lacking, and it appears that the entire rest api is marked as experimental. Second, although it allows for some basic hosting and whatnot (easily replicated by a free server like geoserver, which is trivial to set up), it once again does not have any real processing engine, so you have to download all of the data to another server you own anyway to do any real work on the data.

That being said, I really do think it is a great product, and I definitely point people in your direction if they are looking for a quick an easy way to add a map to a site with some basic data. At the same time, I am not sure the enterprise plan really makes much sense, since the results can be so easily replicated with geoserver + openlayers and you already need a server solution anyway for running a processing engine like grass or pyqgis.

Also note: I am probably not your typical use case, and I realize that most people just need to throw preprocessed layers on a static map. All I can say is that I look forward to the day when I do not feel like I am the only one around doing dynamic big data GIS on the web, so I don't have to keep building all of this stuff from scratch ;)

I also want to mention that I retract the part about leaflet. I think you guys have wayyy more features than them, but they are the new kids on the block so we can cut them some slack. Also, their controls are the best designed for aesthetics and usability IMHO, which is no small matter.

So why was it outside the ToC to take the five snapshots for the Crime Doesn't Climb gif?

I do not know if the Crime Doesn't Climb usage was against the ToS.

They could have possibly made all their requests within the rate limit imposed by Google. I'm unsure, however, if their usage of the data was allowed: "The Elevation API may only be used in conjunction with displaying results on a Google map; using elevation data without displaying a map for which elevation data was requested is prohibited." [1]

That said, I certainly think it's reasonable to want Google to allow paid access to their API at a rate between their current free offering and their prohibitively expensive offering for personal and small business usage.

[1] https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/elevation/#...