Today I Learned: Google Geocoding Costs More but ChatGPT Helped Me Fix It

Google changed their billing scheme for geocoding in March. Previously, all users were given a $200 credit for Google geocoding per month. Google removed the credit and replaced it with 10,000 geocoding calls per month, and my bill went up!

I've known for a while that my pytest code is running every time the QSO tracker is automatically kicked off by github, (which is about 4 times per hour.) Those test cases make seven Google geocoding API calls each. As of April, they mattered. Adding up all the calls assuming that my QSO tracker spots me zero times in a month and that I log no QSOs, so just the calls from the test cases, gives:

geocodes	runs/hour	hours	days/month	geocodes/month
7	4	24	30	20160

which is well over the free limit.

I asked ChatGPT to change my action so that the test cases would only run when Python files in the repo changed. This was NOT vibe coding. I had to ask ChatGPT to fix its own coding errors 3 times, handing it the error message each time. It did it though. On its fourth attempt, it generated code that turned off pytest unless Python files are pushed. I'm back to just paying per QSO. If I have more than 10,000 QSOs in a month, well, that's a kinda cool problem to have!

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