Foursquare's Places API gives developers global POI and geotagging data with $200/month free usage credit, pay-as-you-go pricing, and enterprise volume plans.
Foursquare was founded in 2009 in New York City by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai as a location-based social check-in app. Over time the company pivoted its business toward location data and intelligence, and today its main commercial product for developers is the Places API, accessible through developer.foursquare.com.
The Places API exposes a geospatial database covering more than 100 million points of interest in over 200 countries, built from more than 16 billion historical check-ins and a billion-plus photos, tips, and reviews accumulated since the original consumer app launched. This dataset underpins place search, autocomplete, geotagging, and place-matching features that other companies build into their own apps.
Core API capabilities include place search, place details, autocomplete for address and venue lookups, place matching (resolving a raw address or name to a canonical place record), and geotagging candidates for tagging user-generated content with location context. Endpoints are split into standard, Pro, and Premium tiers, with Pro covering search, details, autocomplete, and matching, and Premium covering richer data like tips and photos.
Foursquare markets the dataset's freshness and verification as a differentiator, since it is continuously refreshed using both automated signals and human-verified check-in data rather than being a static, periodically refreshed places database.
Foursquare uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model for the Places API. Every developer account receives $200 in free usage credit per month, plus up to 10,000 free calls to select Pro endpoints, making it possible to build and test integrations without any upfront cost.
Beyond the free credit, pricing is volume-based: higher monthly call volumes reduce the effective per-call cost. Enterprise accounts negotiate custom volume pricing and discounts directly with Foursquare's sales team, which is typical for organizations doing millions of lookups per month.
Every account gets $200 in free usage credit per month plus limited free Pro endpoint calls; usage beyond that is billed pay-as-you-go.
It provides search, details, autocomplete, place matching, and geotagging data across more than 100 million points of interest worldwide.
Developers building mapping apps, location-based marketing, geofencing, and ad tech platforms use the Places API.
Foursquare originated as a consumer check-in app in 2009 but today focuses primarily on licensing its location data through developer APIs.
Enterprise customers with high call volumes negotiate custom volume-based pricing directly with Foursquare's sales team.