since it's being positioned as the more cost effective option as views go up, that still doesn't make sense. Can you provide a link?
EDIT: ok, so that's an order of magnitude difference from your first post. that's well below the CPM for the "overage" charge, but well over it if you take into account the 25k initial views per day. It still doesn't make sense if they are legitimately offering that as the better high-end option.
I don't want to go all ad-hominemy, but based on your "Google Maps is dead, long live OpenStreetMap!" comment, I'm going to go ahead and take your numbers with a gigantic grain of salt :)
I am less than happy that Google Maps is dead. OpenStreetMap is still far from being comparable.
I think I made a mistake with the figures. I just checked that email again and it says 10,000$ for 1 million page views per day for public facing deployments. What a shame.
Google is changing. They used to be startup friendly. Now they focus on internal startups, and with a switch of a button cut services to potential competing startups.
http://www.google.com/enterprise/earthmaps/maps-compare.html
Unfortunately, they don't list pricing in an obvious way.