[ajtaylor]

At $work in Australia, we went through this a couple months ago. After an initial quote that was beyond ridiculous, we worked out a much better deal with the local Google reseller. In addition, to help keep map views down we stopped unconditionally loading the map. Instead we have a placeholder image which when clicked loads the maps API dynamically. Google's fine with this behaviour as long as we don't use their map image.

We looked at other map providers, and in particular Bing and TileStream/OSM. But Bing's cost was 1) nearly what Google wanted and 2) confusing to try and get an actual price because there are about 10 different ways to get a Bing maps license. OSM ended up being ruled out because 1) we weren't confident in the data quality in India and Malaysia and 2) I couldn't find an easy way to geocode.

I wish I had known about the Mapstraction project freyfogle mentioned. I would have seriously considered using it since we were already moving from v2 to v3 of the Google Maps API. Future proofing our maps implementation would have been nice.