Open Places API Is Open Places API a Foursquare Places API replacement?
For backend proximity search (find places near a coordinate), yes. It does not replace Foursquare's rich venue attributes like photos, tips, ratings, or real-time popularity signals.
Comparison
Foursquare Places alternative for flat-priced search.
Foursquare's product is venue intelligence: deep attributes on 100M+ places. Ours is narrower: proximity search over open Overture data, flat plans with hard caps, and your own data layers on top. The right pick depends on which half you're actually buying.
Buy the data depth you'll actually 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. |
| Venue richness | Names, coordinates, categories, addresses, distances. That's the product. | Photos, tips, ratings, hours, chains, real-time popularity. |
| Base data | Open Overture Places, refreshed monthly, published schema. | Proprietary index plus a separately released open dataset. |
| Your own place records | Account-owned layers: corrections, suppressions, private records, per-key presets. | Managed through their platform's custom data options. |
| Pricing model | Flat plans, hard caps, no overages. $0 / $19 / $99 per month. | Usage-based per call; see current Foursquare pricing. |
| Coverage | 39M places, 18 countries, live in production. Listed explicitly. | Global, 100M+ POIs. |
When Foursquare is the right call.
If your product displays venues (a city guide showing photos and tips, a check-in feature, anything where the place detail page is the experience), Foursquare's attribute depth is the product and worth its per-call price. Their global coverage also matters if you need markets beyond our 18 countries.
When we are.
If your backend asks "what's near this coordinate" and renders the answer itself (store finders, travel itineraries, delivery zones, AI agent tools), you're paying venue-intelligence prices for a proximity lookup. Flat plans make that cost a constant instead of a variable, and account layers let you fix or extend the open base where your product needs it.
Foursquare alternative FAQ.
How does pricing differ from Foursquare?
Foursquare prices per call with usage-based billing. Open Places API uses flat monthly plans with hard caps: $0 for 10,000 searches, $19 for 100,000, $99 for 1 million. At the cap the API stops with a 402 instead of billing overage.
Doesn't Foursquare also have open data?
Yes. Foursquare released an open Places dataset, which is genuinely useful if you want to self-host. Open Places API is for teams that want open-data search hosted, with account-owned corrections and private records merged in.
When is Foursquare the better choice?
When venue richness is the product: photos, tips, ratings, chain resolution, real-time popularity. Open Places API intentionally serves a narrower answer: names, coordinates, categories, addresses, distances.
More comparisons.
Google Places · Geoapify · LocationIQ · HERE