If you want to develop a mobile application or a website that incorporates maps or directions in a big way, you'll probably want to start fresh with an alternative to Google Maps, especially if you aim to produce an ambitious application or expect lots of visitors to your website. If you're running a small business and your use of the Google Maps API extends just to showcasing directions to retail locations, you shouldn't need to worry about switching, as you are unlikely to reach the 25,000-visits-per-day limit, unless you want to implement your own features in your maps or make them look a certain way.

Google is allowing for occasional increased use by charging only businesses that hit limit for 90 days consecutively. So Google won’t penalize you if a newspaper runs a story about your business and you see a corresponding spike in map requests for a week.

If you do consistently send Google Maps more than 25,000 requests daily, Google will charge you between $4 and $10 (depending on which Google Maps API your site uses) for every 1000 map loads beyond that limit. Sebastian Delmont, CTO of the real-estate portal StreetEasy, that his firm would have had to pay Google hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to continue using Google Maps. As Delmont explains it, the company considered using another service, but management decided that StreetEasy should build its own maps instead—and the company couldn’t be happier.

OpenStreetMap is the hands-down favorite dataset of that have migrated from Google Maps. OpenStreetMap is a collaborative effort to create a free, user-editable map of the world--think of it as a Wikipedia for maps. Anyone with a WordPress website can use OpenStreetMap on their website right away simply by installing . OpenStreetMap isn’t a drop-in replacement for Google Maps, however; you’ll need a third-party tool to enable your visitors to obtain directions to your location and to draw out other data. Here are two of the best examples: