> The best part is that they can now offer it to App Store developers as a free SDK. Meanwhile the same developers would have to pay an exorbitant cost to use Google Maps.

Apple Mapkit is free up to 25K api call a day, after that you have to contact Apple for more (and pay I guess?).

I was also surprised to see that there is no cost for using Apple Maps (maybe because it's a beta?). How will this affect services like Google Maps, Mapbox, and similar providers?