Their write up (linked at top of page below main link, and in a comment) says:

> "media artist Yufeng Zhao fed millions of publicly-available panoramas from Google Street View into a computer program that transcribes text within the images (anyone can access these Street View images; you don’t even need a Google account!)."

Maybe they used multiple IPs / devices and didn't want to mention doing something technically naughty to get around Google's free limits, or maybe they somehow didn't hit a limit doing it as a single user? Either way, it doesn't sound like they had to pay if they only mention not needing an account.

(Or maybe they just thought people didn't need to know that they had to pay, and that readers would just want the free access to look up a few images, rather than a whole city's worth?)

Any possibility this is user-submitted panoramas, and maybe they don't charge for those?