If you have ever tried to turn an address into latitude and longitude (or the other way around), you know the pain. Half the providers want a credit card before they even say hello, and the other half hide their pricing behind a sales call. The good news is, there is actually a healthy lineup of free geocoding APIs in 2026 that will cover most hobby projects, MVPs, and even some small production workloads. Below is the honest tour. What each one gives you, where it falls flat, and how to pick without spending a weekend reading docs.
Quick refresher on what geocoding means
Forward geocoding turns an address into coordinates. Reverse geocoding does the opposite. Coordinates in, address out. Most APIs do both, plus an autocomplete endpoint for typeahead UIs. When comparing free tiers, check which of these endpoints are included. Some providers throttle autocomplete way harder than plain geocoding.
The OpenStreetMap crowd
Nominatim is the OG. It is free, no API key, no signup, and it is powered by OpenStreetMap data. The catch is that the public instance is throttled to about 1 request per second, and they really mean it. Abuse the limit and you will get banned by IP. Great for prototypes, bad for anything customer facing. If you fall in love, you can self host on a small VPS for a few bucks a month. Photon is its faster, fuzzier cousin built on Elasticsearch. Perfect when you want autocomplete that does not feel like dial up. Both share OSM’s biggest strength (the data is community maintained and permissively licensed) and its biggest weakness (coverage varies wildly by region. Central London is gorgeous, rural Indonesia less so).
The friendly free tiers
LatLng gives you 3,000 requests per day with no credit card, OSM data under the hood, and sub 50ms response times from edge servers. They cover forward geocoding, reverse, places, and autocomplete on the same key, which means you can build a whole map feature without juggling vendors. OpenCage hands out 2,500 per day and wraps multiple data sources behind one clean response, so you do not have to babysit edge cases. Their docs are also weirdly good. Actual code samples, not just curl one liners. LocationIQ bumps it up to 5,000 per day, has a global CDN, and a solid autocomplete endpoint. All three are OSM flavored, all three are CORS friendly, and all three are the sweet spot for indie devs who do not want to deal with a billing dashboard.
The big names (with strings attached)
MapTiler offers 100,000 requests per month free, which is honestly bananas, and they do not ask for a card up front. Mapbox matches that number but requires a credit card. Read the fine print though. You cannot permanently store the coordinates on their free tier. Google Maps Geocoding gives you a $200 per month credit (roughly 40,000 requests), and its accuracy is still the gold standard, especially for ambiguous or partial addresses. HERE throws in 30,000 transactions per month and quietly shines outside the US. If your users are in Europe or Asia, it is worth a benchmark.
The self host route
If you are going to outgrow every free tier anyway, just skip the middleman. Pelias is an open source geocoder that combines OSM, OpenAddresses, GeoNames, and Who’s On First into one index. Run it on a $10 per month VPS, front it with a Worker for caching. Self hosted Nominatim is even simpler for basic geocoding. The downside is a weekend of setup and a data refresh cron job.
So which one should you pick?
Honestly, it depends on what you are building. For a weekend hack or a small SaaS, start with LatLng or LocationIQ. Generous limits, clean docs, no card required. Need instant autocomplete? Photon or LocationIQ. Going global with top tier accuracy needs? You will drift toward Google or HERE eventually. And if you are a Cloudflare nerd (guilty), put a Worker in front of any of these and cache results in KV or R2. Addresses do not move much, so geocoding responses are wildly cacheable, and you will stretch any free tier into something that feels unlimited. Bonus: a Worker hides your API key from the browser, which most providers technically require anyway.
One last thing: read the licensing
This is the part everyone skips and regrets later. Most free tiers ban permanent storage of coordinates, with OSM based providers (under ODbL) being the most permissive. Google and Mapbox are notably strict. Caching their results in your own database long term is a ToS violation. If you need to persist results forever, either pay for a commercial tier or self host. Self hosting is almost always the cheapest endgame once you cross a few hundred thousand lookups a month.
Happy geocoding.
