Review API Pricing Compared: Google, Yelp, Trustpilot, G2

Four platforms own most of the review data a US business cares about, and all four sell access to it very differently. One publishes a rate card. One meters you per call with a monthly credit. One hides API access behind a sales add-on. One will not talk to you without a partnership agreement. Comparing them on headline price alone gets you the wrong answer, because the thing that decides your real cost is not the monthly fee, it is how much review data you get back per call and how long you are allowed to keep it.

Every figure below was read on the platform's own documentation or pricing page on 29 August 2026.

Review API pricing compared

Read at each platform's own documentation and pricing pages on 29 August 2026. Where a platform publishes no figure, this table says so rather than estimating one.

How much does the Yelp API cost?

Yelp's pricing page lists three monthly plans for what is now called the Places API, the product most developers still know as Fusion: Base at $229, Enhanced at $299 and Premium at $643. Enhanced adds $6.57 per additional 1,000 calls and Premium $14.13. Above 150,000 monthly calls you are pushed to an Enterprise sales form.

The trap is that the $229 headline plan has no review access whatsoever. Yelp documents Base as no access to review excerpts and no access to photos, so the real entry price for anything review-shaped is $299. Even then you get three excerpts of roughly 160 characters each, Yelp picks which three based on recency and voting, and you may cache the content for a maximum of 24 hours. There is also no free tier any more, only a 30-day trial of 5,000 calls that Yelp's FAQ marks in capitals as evaluation only. The full Yelp API breakdown is here, including the endpoint map and the two different HTTP 429s.

How much does the Google reviews API cost?

Google is the outlier on price and the outlier on volume, in opposite directions. There is no monthly subscription: the Places API is billed per call with a recurring monthly credit that covers small workloads outright, which makes it by far the cheapest of the four to start with and often free in practice for a single-location business.

What you cannot buy at any price is more reviews. The Places API returns a hard maximum of five reviews for a business, with no pagination and no way to request the sixth. Full text, properly attributed, but five. For a restaurant with 900 Google reviews, that is five. The separate Business Profile API can reach your own full review history and lets you post replies, but it gates access behind an approval process rather than a payment. Our Google Reviews API page covers that approval process and the quota check that tells you whether you have been approved.

How much does the Trustpilot API cost?

Trustpilot has the most capable review API of the four and the least transparent pricing for it. API access is not included in any plan. It appears as an add-on line on Plus, Premium and Enterprise, and it does not appear at all on Free or Starter, so your floor is the $319 a month Plus plan, per domain, billed annually on a 12-month commitment, plus an add-on price you can only get from a sales conversation.

What that buys is genuinely different from the others: full review text, up to 100,000 records from the standard endpoint and more through a cursor-paged all-reviews endpoint, filters on stars and language and response status, the invitation data that ties a review back to the send that produced it, and private endpoints that let you post replies programmatically. If you need to own and analyze your own review history, this is the only one of the four that really lets you. The Trustpilot API page has the endpoint map and the published rate limits.

How much does the G2 API cost?

G2 publishes no price. Its own syndication documentation states that your G2 representative will provide you an API key for access to the review syndication endpoints, which is a polite way of saying there is no self-serve route and every arrangement is negotiated. You will not find a pricing page, a free tier or a trial.

Third-party blogs quote figures for G2 API access. Treat those with suspicion, including the ones that quote them while selling you a scraper. What is verifiable is the access model: a partnership, a representative and a key. If you are a G2 customer already, the syndication program is worth asking your account manager about directly, because the answer depends on your existing contract more than on any list price.

How many reviews does each API actually return?

This is the number that should drive the decision, and it is the one buried deepest in every set of docs. The gap between Google's five and Trustpilot's hundred thousand is not a detail, it is the difference between two completely different projects.

The caching rules matter more than the prices

Every one of these platforms restricts how long you may keep the data, and those rules quietly decide your architecture before you have written a line of code.

Yelp is the strictest: 24 hours for content, with business IDs the one thing you may store indefinitely. That rules out the warehouse pattern entirely. You cannot legitimately build a permanent table of Yelp review text to trend across quarters, so teams that want a Yelp trend line end up logging only the aggregate rating and review count each day, which is allowed and is usually enough. Google permits substantially longer for most content. Trustpilot goes the other way and actively tells you to store review data in your own backend, because its rate-limiting guidance explicitly says to avoid pulling review data directly into your website's frontend.

A 24-hour expiry also means the refresh job is now load-bearing. If it fails on a Tuesday, your dashboard is not showing stale data with a warning, it is showing nothing, and nobody notices until someone asks why the review count looks wrong. This is the unglamorous half of any review integration, and it is worth wiring the same freshness and volume monitoring you would put on any other data feed around it rather than trusting a cron job you set up once and forgot.

Which review API should you choose?

Match the API to the job rather than to the price, because these four barely overlap.

• You need your own full review history in a database. Trustpilot, and it is not close. It is the only one of the four that returns full text at volume, filters properly and exposes the invitation data that ties a review to the request that caused it.
• You are building a local discovery or business data product. Yelp. Premium exposes 66 business attributes covering hours, categories, price tier and transactions across millions of US businesses. That is what the Places API is genuinely built for, and it does it well.
• You need location and map features with a few reviews attached. Google. Cheapest to run, full text, and the five-review cap is irrelevant if reviews are a garnish rather than the point.
• You sell B2B software and want your G2 proof syndicated. G2, through your account manager. There is no other route.
• You want reviews on your marketing pages. None of them. See below.

When you should not buy a review API at all

Most people who search for a reviews API want the same thing: star ratings and a few quotes rendering on a homepage or a landing page. An API is close to the worst way to do that, and two of these four platforms say so in their own documentation.

Trustpilot's rate-limiting guidance tells developers to avoid pulling review data directly into a website frontend, because the page then calls the API on every single view. That is a plain statement that the API is not the intended display mechanism. Yelp arrives at the same place from a different direction: you would pay $299 a month to render three truncated sentences you did not choose, refreshed daily, inside Yelp's brand and attribution rules. Google's five-review cap makes a convincing social proof section impossible on its own.

A widget does this job with no key, no quota, no caching rule and no engineering time. The trade is that you get display rather than data, which is exactly right when display was the requirement. Where an API genuinely earns its cost is the other job: getting review data into systems, into reporting, into a warehouse. Being clear about which of the two you actually need saves most teams a quarter of wasted integration work. If it is display, our reviews aggregator puts Google, G2, Trustpilot and your own reviews in one feed without any of the four approval processes above.

The honest caveat about all four

None of these APIs solves the problem most businesses actually have, which is not having enough reviews to display in the first place. An API is a distribution mechanism for review data you already own. If your Google profile has eleven reviews, the Places API will faithfully return five of your eleven, and no integration work changes that number.

Collection is a separate discipline and it is where the return is. Asking at the right moment, through the right channel, with a link that takes one tap to use, moves review counts far more than any data pipeline does. It is worth being honest that a review API project is often a well-engineered answer to the wrong question, and worth checking which problem you are really solving before anyone requests a key.