Is Google Drive API free?
No it's not free but the new pricing is much cheaper.
However if you decide to move away from Google Drive and their storage services, there is a chance to be priced higher per month if you need to use other storage systems such as AWS or Dropbox.
Google Drive is free for up to 5 users, but requires your organization to be a verified G Suite enterprise customer (G Suite users get special pricing). It depends on how you define free. In Google Drive as well as Google Plus if you don't pay anything every month.
You can pay for the service either by. Purchasing a product license. Signing up for a paid service offering. You pay based on the number of employees in your organization, the features you use and the level of access you want. So if your an individual you will probably not have any access at all or it will be very limited.
Is there an API for Google Docs?
I am interested in a programmatic way to manipulate a Google Doc using Python.
I have searched around the web and there doesn't seem to be any way to do this without either a Google account or a way to use Chrome extensions that can access the Google Drive filesystem to programmatically create and modify files.
I have considered: Creating documents through the XML API, but I was hoping for something closer to REST. A desktop sync program, which seems like overkill just to handle a simple update. Use chrome extension "file manager" mode. Any suggestions? Thanks! Update: I was able to get the file ID from the DriveFile objects returned by the HTTP requests. From this I was able to update the file directly through the XML API. I'll leave this answer up for posterity, in case anyone else comes looking for an API to programmatically modify files in Google Docs.
The XML API has a way to send a POST request to google drive, so you can create a document. As far as I know this is not possible via HTTP requests, I don't think you can access Google Drive directly through a web browser. The closest I can think of is something like an Ubuntu One client.
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