It actually might be a good idea to fetch the value fields as well, since that would make conversion to other metrics easier. Thanks for the suggestion.
I do think it would be valuable to fetch the value field, as then the user can format the text however they want - for example, I may want to say "96 minutes" instead of "1 hour 36 minutes".
Additionally, it's much easier to compare two values (e.g. if one wanted to compare distances between X and Y versus X and Z).
The Google Distance Matrix has a limit of 10x10 locations (25x25 with business license) -- how do you get around that? I don't see any mention of API-key?
The Google Distance API does not require an API key, but this is something that should be supported for business licenses and per-key quota limit tracking.
Here are the quota limits:
Users of the free API:
100 elements per query.
100 elements per 10 seconds.
2 500 elements per 24 hour period.
Maps for Business customers:
625 elements per query.
1 000 elements per 10 seconds.
100 000 elements per 24 hour period.
If people want to use this API to convert to a different unit, they have to parse the text which would be very clunky.