If by public service, you mean browser based, perhaps you should bypass Perl for a purely browser based, Javascripted solution, namely, <canvas>. In which case, not only do you avoid the hit for pushing the data to Google, you can actually avoid the hit for processing in your server, and let the browser do the rendering.

<canvas> does have some issues (no native text drawing, no native IE support, hard to get static copies of the image, etc.), but its a fairly serviceable solution.

Here's some pointers:

• canvas tutorial at Mozilla Dev Center
• excanvas and moocanvas for IE
• Capturing a canvas image
• (Shameless self promotion) PlotJax - still very alpha, but supports gestures
• (More shameless self promotion) Shodo for drawing text in a canvas

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