Free Google Maps Scraper: What "Free" Really Gets You in 2026
Key takeaways
- "Free" Google Maps scraper means five different things: the free plan of a hosted tool, a free browser extension, an open-source script, the official Places API with its free monthly usage, or plain copy and paste.
- Each option trades money for something else: your time, your technical skill, or a tighter limit on how many leads you can pull.
- Google publishes free monthly usage for its own API. It is generous for phone and website data but needs a billing account, code, and gives you no emails.
- Test any free option on one search you already know the answer to before you build a workflow on it.
Search for a free Google Maps scraper and you will find extensions, GitHub repositories, hosted tools with free plans, and tutorials that use Google's own API. They are not interchangeable. Picking the wrong one means an afternoon of setup that ends in a list you cannot use.
This guide sorts the free options by what they actually cost you, shows what Google itself gives away, and ends with a five-minute test you can run on any of them.
The five kinds of free
| Option | What you get for free | What you pay instead | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free plan of a hosted tool | A small monthly allowance of leads, no setup | A cap on volume, and often a limit on exports or emails | Testing a niche, small lists, non-technical users |
| Free browser extension | Quick extraction from the page you are on | Broad browser permissions, a browser that must stay open, changes when Google changes the page | One-off small batches |
| Open-source script from GitHub | The code, unlimited by the tool itself | Your time to run and repair it, plus the risk of blocks and captchas | Developers who can maintain it |
| Google Places API | Free monthly usage per price tier, official data | A billing account, code, no emails, and terms on how you may store the data | Developers who want official, structured data |
| Manual copy and paste | Nothing to install | Hours of your time | A handful of businesses |
None of these is wrong. The mistake is choosing on the word "free" alone, when the real question is which cost you can afford to pay.
What Google gives away with its own API
The official route to Google Maps business data is the Places API. Its Text Search endpoint returns businesses for a query, and Google's price list shows a free monthly usage amount for each price tier. As shown on Google's pricing page, last updated 2026-09-17:
| Text Search tier | Fields that trigger it | Free usage per month | Price after the free usage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essentials (IDs only) | Place IDs only | Unlimited | No charge |
| Pro | Name, address, location, types, photos, Maps link | 5,000 requests | $32 per 1,000 requests at the entry tier |
| Enterprise | Phone number, website, rating, review count | 1,000 requests | $35 per 1,000 requests at the entry tier |
Prices and free amounts change. Check Google's current price list before you plan around them. Volume discounts apply at higher usage.
Two limits matter for lead lists. Each request returns at most 20 places, and Google documents a maximum of 60 results across all pages of one query. Emails are not part of the response at all. If you can write code, this is a legitimate free route for phone and website data; the walkthrough is in Google Places API with Python, and the cost maths is in Places API pricing for lead lists.
Free tiers of hosted tools: what to read before you sign up
Two tools can both advertise a free plan and behave very differently. Check these points on the pricing page, not the homepage:
- What counts as a lead. A raw listing, a listing with an email, or only a verified email? The same "500 free" can mean very different amounts of usable data.
- Whether you can export. Some free plans let you look but not download.
- Whether emails are included. Google Maps does not list emails, so a tool that shows them has to find them elsewhere. Ask how.
- Whether limits reset monthly or are one-off. A one-off allowance is a trial, not a plan.
- What happens when you hit the limit. A hard stop is fine. A surprise charge is not.
For transparency, this is what LeadOutreach's free plan includes: 100 leads a month, two saved Google Maps searches from the dashboard, 10 email and social enrichment credits, and standard CSV export, with no credit card. Current details are on the pricing page. That is enough to test a niche and a city, not to run an agency's whole prospecting.
GitHub scrapers: what you are signing up for
Search GitHub and you will find many Google Maps scrapers, most of them driving a headless browser. They can work well, and they cost nothing to download. What you take on is the maintenance.
- Google changes its page structure, and scripts that read the page break without warning.
- Automated traffic can trigger captchas or temporary blocks, especially from a home connection.
- Scraping Google's pages sits in a grey area under Google's terms. See Is scraping Google Maps legal? for the risks.
- You still have to find emails, deduplicate results and check quality yourself.
If you are a developer and this is a side project, that may be an acceptable trade. If you are selling to clients on a deadline, it usually is not.
A five-minute test before you commit
- Pick a search you can check yourself, for example a trade in your own town.
- Run it in the tool you are testing and note how long it takes and how many results come back.
- Open Google Maps and compare the first ten results by hand. Are names, phones and websites right?
- Look at the emails, if any. Open five websites and confirm the address is really on the site.
- Export the results and open the file. Are all the columns you need there, and are they clean?
- Note the limit you hit, and how the tool tells you.
If a tool fails this test on a small search, it will not survive a real project.
When free stops being enough
The signs are clear: you are running the same searches every week, you need more than a few hundred leads a month, you want scheduled runs, or you need CRM export. At that point compare tools on total cost, not headline price. The comparison pages for Outscraper, Apify and LeadStal set out the billing models side by side, and the pricing page lists LeadOutreach's paid plans.
Sources and further reading
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Frequently asked questions
Not in a form that is also easy, safe and reliable. Open-source scripts have no usage cap of their own but you maintain them and risk blocks. Hosted tools with free plans cap usage. The official Places API has free monthly usage per tier, then charges.
Partly. Google publishes a free monthly usage amount for each price tier, and the Essentials (IDs only) tier is unlimited. Pro includes 5,000 free requests and Enterprise 1,000 per month, as shown on Google's pricing page. You still need a billing account, and usage beyond the free amount is charged.
Google Maps listings do not include emails. Any tool that shows them finds them somewhere else, usually by reading the business website. Free tools often skip this step or limit it, which is why email coverage varies so much.
100 leads a month, with 10 enrichment credits and standard CSV export, no credit card required. See the pricing page for current limits.
Collecting publicly listed business details is generally treated differently from collecting personal data, but scraping Google's pages can breach Google's terms of service, and how you contact people is governed by email and calling laws. Read the legal guide linked above and take advice for your situation.