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Foursquare Places

Features
Ease of use
Ease of management
Quality of support
Affordability
Market presence
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Pricing from
Pay-as-you-go
Free Trial unavailable
Free version
User corporate size
Small
Medium
Large
User industry
  1. Accommodation and food services
  2. Arts, entertainment, and recreation
  3. Retail and wholesale

What is Foursquare Places

Foursquare Places is a location data and places database product that provides points-of-interest (POI) attributes, venue metadata, and related location signals via APIs and data feeds. It is used by product, data, and engineering teams to power place search, geocoding/reverse geocoding enrichment, store/venue analytics, and location-based personalization. The product differentiates through its focus on POI/venue-level data assets and developer-oriented delivery (APIs, bulk data) rather than end-user mapping or CRM workflows.

pros

Developer-first data delivery

Foursquare Places is delivered through APIs and data products designed for application integration. This supports embedding place lookup and enrichment directly into customer apps, internal tools, and data pipelines. It fits teams that want to programmatically access POI data rather than operate a packaged sales or field-mapping UI.

Rich POI and venue metadata

The dataset centers on venues/places and commonly includes attributes such as categories, names, and location details that can be used for search and enrichment. This structure supports use cases like store locators, place-based segmentation, and contextual analytics. It is oriented to POI-level intelligence rather than only coordinates or device events.

Supports multiple consumption models

Organizations can typically consume the data via real-time API calls for applications and via bulk delivery for analytics and warehousing. This flexibility helps align operational use cases (e.g., in-app place search) with offline analysis (e.g., market coverage studies). It can reduce the need to stitch together separate sources for online and batch workflows.

cons

Requires engineering and data ops

The product is primarily a data/API offering, so value realization depends on integration work, monitoring, and ongoing data governance. Teams without strong engineering resources may find implementation slower than packaged location-intelligence or BI tools. Business users may need additional tooling to explore and visualize outputs.

Coverage and freshness vary

POI datasets can vary by geography, category depth, and update cadence depending on sources and local conditions. Buyers typically need to validate coverage for their target regions and verticals before standardizing on the data. Ongoing QA processes may be required to manage duplicates, closures, and attribute changes.

Not a full BI application

While it can feed analytics, Foursquare Places is not primarily a dashboarding or reporting suite. Organizations often pair it with separate BI, CRM, or field-operations systems to operationalize insights. This can add integration complexity compared with platforms that bundle analytics, workflow, and mapping in one interface.

Plan & Pricing

Pricing model: Pay-as-you-go (volume-based CPM tiers) Free tier/trial: Sandbox with free usage (up to 10,000 free calls on Pro endpoints). Foursquare has also historically offered $200/month in developer free usage credits for direct developer signups (see notes).

Pro endpoints (listed CPM tiers on vendor site):

  • 0 – 10,000 Calls: $0.00 CPM
  • 10,001 – 100,000 Calls: $15.00 CPM
  • 100,001 – 500,000 Calls: $12.00 CPM
  • 500,001 – 1,000,000 Calls: $9.00 CPM
  • 1,000,001 – 5,000,000 Calls: $4.50 CPM
  • 5,000,001+ Calls: $1.25 CPM

Premium endpoints (listed CPM tiers on vendor site):

  • 0 – 100,000 Calls: $18.75 CPM
  • 100,001 – 500,000 Calls: $15.00 CPM
  • 500,001 – 1,000,000 Calls: $11.25 CPM
  • 1,000,001 – 5,000,000 Calls: $5.75 CPM
  • 5,000,001+ Calls: $1.75 CPM

Notes & delivery:

  • Pro endpoints include Place Search, Place Details, Autocomplete & Geotagging Candidates when requested with default fields. Premium endpoints include Tips & Photos (and some Search/Details requests when premium fields are requested).
  • Foursquare lists Places as pay-as-you-go with volume-based pricing and indicates enterprise/volume discounts and contact-sales for enterprise-level licensing and data delivery (S3/SFTP/Azure/GCP/Snowflake etc.).

(Information sourced only from Foursquare official pages: pricing and product documentation.)

Seller details

Foursquare Labs, Inc.
New York, NY, USA
2009
Private
https://foursquare.com/
https://x.com/foursquare
https://www.linkedin.com/company/foursquare/

Tools by Foursquare Labs, Inc.

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Foursquare Spatial Workbench
Foursquare Attribution
Foursquare Audience
Foursquare Proximity
Foursquare Spatial Studio
Foursquare Places
Foursquare Places API

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