It’s always nice when a company transitions a product from paid to free, with Google today removing the price tag from Google Earth Pro. This means features including high-resolution images, movie creation and map making are now available to anyone who downloads the application.
Image by Google
Product manager Stafford Marquardt announced the change on Google’s Maps blog Lat Long, though there’s no explanation for the move — not that anyone’s complaining. To get your free copy, you’ll need to grab a key and then download the software.
If you’re wondering what a difference free makes, a Google Earth Pro subscription would normally set you back $US400 per year. Not a huge amount for businesses or educational institutions, but it’s great for everyone else. It also means access to the following features:
Exploring a digital Earth? Not a bad way to spend the afternoon.
Google Earth Pro is now free [Google Lat Long, via OzBargain]
Comments
7 responses to “Free For All: Google Earth Pro Dumps $US400 Subscription Fee”
Google Maps/ earth would be excellent if they updated their maps every once in a while, the current imagery for my house shows a car in my driveway i sold three years ago.
There was a service call near map that updated their imagery about once every two months but they went behind a paywall a while ago and it is outrageously expensive, iirc it’s about $100 a month for about 100mb of data.
I don’t mind my house being delayed in the updates. But I hate it when the shops are not up to date! In the most recent version of google earth/maps the shops they show for my local town haven’t been there in years and several shops have moved down the road for cheaper rent. It makes locating a business difficult.
I believe it is up to the shop owner’s responsibility to register their business on Google Maps, not Google itself.
There seems to be a problem with obtaining the key…. Don’t think it is just me.
But the explanation is gibberish….
Try again, I was successful on the second go.
Had the same issue, hitting back then submit kept failing.
Used Ctrl Shift Reload (f5) to reload the submission page, then it worked.
This is a pretty big development. Google Earth Pro is used extensively in geoservices departments. Every company with a geoservices section that I’ve worked for or with uses it.