[3LazTjBv-f]

I don't think this is true for a while (5 years). There are view limits and I still find embedded maps that look just like this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50977913/google-maps-sho... .

[ohgodplsno]

Currently working on multiple apps hitting anywhere between 5k and 150k maps loads a day, costs are zero because we do not do things outside of the free usage tier. The Maps Embed API (the one you see on websites) is pretty clear on that: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/embed/usage...

    Pricing for the Maps Embed API
    All Maps Embed API requests are available at no charge with unlimited usage.

    Other usage limits
    There are no short-term (queries per second) or long-term (queries per day) limits on the Maps Embed API.

Similar things apply to the Maps SDK for Android. Seeing the watermark means that there's either no API key being sent with the request or, in relatively new developments, that you haven't enabled billing/inputted a credit card. Which is a scary thing to do when you know that you're not doing anything out of the usage limits... but what if Google suddenly decided that ?

[Gustomaximus]

This. I'm paying for maps API as have sites that display it on pages + the directions requests.

Some sites we added it as an image to avoid this. Some sites got flagged as weren't allowed to do this and others have been ignored.