Open Places API Choose Foursquare
The place page needs ratings, photos, tips, chains, popularity, rich venue metadata, or a Foursquare-specific source.
Foursquare Places API pricing
Foursquare Places API pricing in 2026, and when an alternative fits.
Foursquare gives you 500 free Pro calls a month, then bills $15.00 per 1,000 calls until you pass 100,000. Whether that's the right spend depends on the job: photos, tips, and venue intelligence earn it, while plain backend proximity search often doesn't.
What Foursquare charges per 1,000 calls.
Foursquare deprecated its legacy V3 endpoints on May 15, 2026, and moved the current Places API to the rates below on June 1, 2026. Calls bill per 1,000; each endpoint prices as Pro or Premium depending on the fields it returns, and the Ask endpoints carry their own rate.
| Endpoint tier | Monthly call volume | Rate per 1,000 calls |
|---|---|---|
| Pro | 0 to 500 | $0.00 (free) |
| Pro | 501 to 100,000 | $15.00 |
| Pro | 100,001 to 500,000 | $12.00 |
| Pro | 500,001 and up | $9.00 |
| Premium | 0 to 100,000 | $18.75 |
| Premium | 100,001 to 500,000 | $15.00 |
| Premium | 500,001 and up | $11.25 |
| Ask (Pro fields) | All volumes | $30.00 |
| Ask (Premium fields) | All volumes | $36.00 |
On Pro endpoints, those published rates work out to roughly:
- 1,000 calls a month: about $7.50 (the first 500 are free)
- 10,000 calls a month: about $142.50
- 100,000 calls a month: about $1,492.50
Treat these as estimates inside the first paid bracket. Past 100,000 calls the published per-1,000 rate drops, so confirm how your account applies the brackets before you budget a larger volume.
Last validated , against Foursquare's developer change notice and pricing page. The two currently disagree on the free allowance: the change notice says 500 free Pro calls a month, while a callout lower on the pricing page still advertises up to 10,000 free calls. The figures here follow the recently updated developer notice; confirm the numbers in your Foursquare account before you commit to a budget.
Flat plans for the narrower search job.
Open Places API prices differently because it does less: server-side proximity search and category area listing over open Overture-backed data, not venue profiles. Plans are flat with hard caps: $0 for 10,000 searches a month, $19 for 30,000, $49 for 100,000, and $249 for 1 million. At the cap the API stops serving instead of billing overage.
The other difference is what you keep. Results carry confidence fields and permissive open-data licensing, so you can cache and store them, and account-owned layers hold your corrections, suppressions, and private records. Foursquare's per-call rates buy photos, tips, ratings, hours, popularity, and a proprietary global venue index that we don't offer. Full plan details are on the pricing page.
Do not pay for venue depth you will not use.
| Need | Open Places API | Foursquare Places |
|---|---|---|
| Backend place search | Yes. One authenticated /v1/places GET for server-side JSON. | Yes. Search, autocomplete, and details endpoints are part of the platform. |
| Venue-rich product experience | No photos, tips, ratings, or real-time popularity signals. | A core reason to use Foursquare. |
| Open dataset option | Hosted Overture-backed search. Foursquare-sourced open records are part of Overture's base data. | FSQ OS Places is available as an open dataset if you want to run it yourself. |
| Area listing and storage | Use category browse, page with offset, and store returned open-data results. | Review current Foursquare caching and API terms for your account type. |
| Your own place records | Account-owned layers: corrections, suppressions, private records, per-key presets. | Available through Foursquare's platform and data products, not as the same first-class layer concept. |
| Pricing model | Flat plans, hard caps, no overages. $0 / $19 / $49 / $249 per month. | Usage-based per 1,000 calls by endpoint tier; see the rate table above and current Foursquare pricing. |
| Coverage | 73.6 million places with global Overture coverage; quality varies by location. | Broader global POI footprint and proprietary venue data. |
The hosted-search alternative to self-hosting open places data.
Foursquare also publishes FSQ OS Places as open data. That is useful when your team wants raw files, batch joins, enrichment, or full control over its own serving stack. The tradeoff is operational: ingest, index, monitor, serve, and refresh it every month.
Open Places API is for the other path: keep the data-serving stack out of your backlog and call a hosted proximity search endpoint from your backend.
curl -G "https://api.openplacesapi.com/v1/places" \
--data-urlencode "q=hotel" \
--data-urlencode "lat=51.5074" \
--data-urlencode "lon=-0.1278" \
--data-urlencode "radius_mi=10" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $OPEN_PLACES_API_KEY"Choose by the job.
Choose Open Places API
The product needs nearby place search, predictable monthly quotas, open Overture-backed data, and account-owned corrections.
Choose self-hosting
Your team already runs geospatial data pipelines and wants full control over ranking, filtering, infrastructure, and refresh cadence.
Foursquare pricing and alternative FAQ.
How much does the Foursquare Places API cost?
Under the rates effective June 1, 2026, Pro endpoints cost $15.00 per 1,000 calls after 500 free calls a month, dropping to $12.00 per 1,000 above 100,000 calls and $9.00 above 500,000. Premium endpoints run $18.75 down to $11.25 per 1,000, and Ask endpoints cost $30.00 to $36.00 per 1,000. Verify current rates on Foursquare's pricing page before budgeting.
Does the Foursquare Places API have a free tier?
Foursquare's recently updated developer change notice lists 500 free Pro calls a month under the June 2026 rates, while part of its marketing pricing page still advertises up to 10,000 free calls. Check your account console for the allowance that applies to you.
Is Open Places API a Foursquare Places API replacement?
For backend proximity search, sometimes. It does not replace Foursquare's richer venue intelligence, such as photos, tips, ratings, rich hours, chain data, popularity, or movement-based products.
How does Open Places API pricing differ from Foursquare?
Foursquare Places API pricing is usage-based by endpoint and tier. Open Places API uses flat monthly quotas with hard caps: $0 for 10,000 searches, $19 for 30,000, $49 for 100,000, and $249 for 1 million. At the cap the API stops instead of billing overage, and returned open-data results can be stored.
What about FSQ OS Places?
FSQ OS Places is a valuable open dataset if you want to self-host or run data pipelines. Open Places API is different: it hosts Overture-backed proximity search as an API, so you do not run ingestion, indexing, serving, and monthly refreshes yourself.
When is Foursquare the better choice?
When venue richness is load-bearing: photos, tips, ratings, rich metadata, global venue intelligence, or Foursquare-specific data. Open Places API is intentionally narrower.
More comparisons.
Google Places · Mapbox · HERE · Geoapify · LocationIQ