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Save Google Maps Cost in Selenium WebDriver Tests

How to Bypass Google Maps in your Selenium WebDriver Tests, saving cost!

3 min readAug 16, 2025

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Non-Medium members: You can read this article for free on Substack.

In the article, “Drive Google Map Address validation with Selenium WebDriver”, I showed how to use Selenium WebDriver to select and validate a Google Map address.

Some of software professionals know that Google Map usage is not free, the cost is pretty trivial most of the time.

However, when you have a big E2E regression suite (as in real Agile projects), like my father’s WhenWise Suite, with over 600 End-to-End (UI) selenium tests. Not only that, he runs the whole suite frequently (as regression testing) in a BuildWise CT server. The cost adds up quite quickly.

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How to save the cost? A logical solution is to minimize the calls to Google Map services.

There are two types of test scripts:

  1. Some rely on Google Maps validation to return the latitude/longitude address, for later use. For this, no change, will continue to use them.
  2. The address does not matter, just needed to pass validation or …

After a quick search, I found a large percentage of tests fall into the second…

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