> A web application with 50,000 map loads using the Google Maps API will cost $350 per month.
> A similar amount of traffic running through a Protomaps CDN install on Cloudflare, with an average of 20 tiles per session, costs fifty cents in Cloudflare Workers request fees.
$350 versus $0.50! Who's going to be the first to build a (maybe Google Maps-compatible?) API on top of this and sell it for a fraction of the cost?
As mentioned in the post there's a _free_ API for non-commercial use that I maintain, and you can make commercial use of it by becoming a GitHub Sponsor:
That's awesome, just saw that myself! This is a super cool project.
Fwiw with "Google Maps compatible" I didn't mean showing Google's Maps, I was thinking more a drop-in replacement to (some subset of) Google's client library.
Hmm, I haven't heard of any open source projects re-implementing Google's client library, and I imagine it would be difficult to keep parity with a closed-source project.
Most open source efforts have consolidated around MapLibre GL https://maplibre.org which is a maintained fork of Mapbox GL before their switch to a source-available license.
It's not as impressive as you make it sound. The real value of the Maps API is in 1) routing and 2) local business details. These are both hard for anybody else to provide, so Google prices them accordingly. The price for the tiles is just an extension to the overall pricing.
There are lots of usecases for apps that don't need these advanced features, and just want a nice backdrop for their geo data.
The current offerings of google, mapbox, bing, etc are prohibitively expensive when you just need a small subset of their features.
The company I work for is a happy customer of maptiler.com which even offers routing and reverse geocoding. It might not be as great and up to date as google's, but it's more than enough for our apps.
OpenStreetMap tile servers aren't really meant to be used for this. They do allow some use, but are also subject to throttling if your application puts too much load on their servers.
> However, OpenStreetMap’s own servers are run entirely on donated resources. They have strictly limited capacity. Heavy use of OSM tiles adversely affects people’s ability to edit the map, and is an abuse of the individual donations and sponsorship which provide hardware and bandwidth. As a result, we require that users of the tiles abide by this tile usage policy.
That is usually out of the question, because raster tiles don't allow you to customize the map (colors, which features to display at which zoom levels, etc). I find openstreetmap way too busy as a backdrop for data.
As I've said, the solutions are there, and there is an actual demand for cheap vector tile hosting without all of the other cruft that is bundled in the commercial solutions but isn't actually needed.
Thanks, but I'm really happy with our vector tileset solution, and don't want to downgrade to raster tiles. They are pretty slow compared to vector tiles with mapbox/maplibre gl.
Additionally, embedding maps in websites, the thing that most small businesses are wanting to do, is free. The pricing looks to me like it's centered around features that companies might be integrating into their products in order to monetise, which seems fair.
> All Maps Embed API requests are available at no charge with unlimited usage.
I used it for my app (https://turas.app) and it is very, very capable for a free product (cross my fingers that they don't jack it up like they did Maps API proper).
Actually as far as I can tell it's the other way around: if you embed the JS map it's free, but static tiles are charged API requests. I suspect this is because the JS map allows Google to create onwards journeys into Google Maps, and has limited utility outside embedding maps, whereas the static map tiles could be used in all sorts of products. I could be wrong though.
That situation is actually kind of outrageous. Municipalities and governmental bodies feed data into Google rather than publicly-accessible platforms (like OSM). And so do the private businesses, with no regulatory mechanism forcing either them to submit the same data to local / public databases (like yellow pages, national map site / registries, or OSM) or forcing Google to provide dumps of its data for the public to use.
I hate having to access Google to find information which is simply not available in map for, or at all, elsewhere.
Yeah I agree. As near as I can tell municipalities treat Alphabet like their own data utility. They consider it an extension of their government. I have two kids in public school and those schools' reliance on these closed platforms is almost 100% complete for everything from newsletters to surveys to class sign-up and bill payment. It is the largest thing that keeps me from de-googling my life.
I'm not necessarily saying municipalities should build this stuff out themselves, only that it freaks me out when small governments rely on giant corporations to support their infrastructure.
> These are both hard for anybody else to provide, so Google prices them accordingly.
I used to provide data to Google, mark missing postboxes, etc. Then I realised I am just helping them make money.
Also they used to be quick, and got sloppy - 7 years ago my submission would get processed in 1 week. Recently i submitted nearby postbox, with GPS coordinates and pictures - 6 months, no responce.
This is lile with social networks - the content is what matters, and people give it away for free
I will say I'm for this setup, but what you're saying is not exactly true. You can customize what is shown with the styling wizard, and completely remove types of markers from maps you create. https://mapstyle.withgoogle.com/
Google Maps isn’t charging for raw bandwidth/storage. They spend massive amounts on R&D to make Maps the most useful and competitive global mapping solution. This comes at a cost, which is completely different than using community-maintained partially-complete OSM maps.
A little naughty to describe OSM as "partially complete" but not Google. Last time I looked, Google didn't have a fraction of the footpaths or cycleways around here that OSM has.
I would be that's actually a majority of usage in the wild. Sometimes I'll zoom out if I need more context, but I'm not wandering around most embedded gmaps.
It is the dominant use case, and a static server-rendered image is more computationally expensive to generate than a tile-based system; a static image has effectively infinite variation in center, bounds and map scale, so requires dynamic computation from a server to send a JPEG/PNG. A tile-based system can just pre-generate a couple million tiles which is exactly the strategy Protomaps uses.
> Tested in production at scale: On AWS, response times average 100 ms for cache hits, 200 ms for misses. Cloudflare is significantly slower, but is improving as Cloudflare's R2 offering matures.
They are comparing the price using Cloudflare, which although cheap, has poor performance.
I don't know anything about these services or their pricing. Maybe AWS costs about the same as Cloudflare, but it's cheeky to have inconsistent comparisons like this. Ideally, this post/advert would provide the equivalent AWS price also (or provide Cloudflare performance numbers).
Author here. AWS is quite a bit more expensive than cloudflare, mostly because of egress charges from Cloudfront.
Cloudflare R2 latency is tricky to predict and can be anywhere from a few hundred milliseconds to 1s+ in my experience. This is for cache misses, only, of course; cache hits are comparable to AWS. Cloudflare really has every incentive to improve their product so I expect this to be much more competitive in the near future.
I haven’t really seen many R2 performance benchmarks, but 1s+ for retrieval is nuts. Is that time to first byte or total time? On what average object size?
Google Map 10X their price on a single price change.
Never trust Google Cloud or run any production servers with them. They have zero empathy for you.
Just today, we got screwed by Google Cloud (as a 4 yrs customer) when they abruptly shutdown our production servers just because we didn't fill up a form on-time.
a 400 month customer is really a tiny fish, don't expect special treatment without support packages. Do you even have an enterprise contract with them? The bronze contract can be had from 0 spend, and gives the option to pay through invoicing and have support. Or are you just going through credit card which is intended for hobby use?
I am not defending them, but this is totally on you.
What was the missing information? Lack of identity verification or credit card verification? Again that's on you. You should have also received a warning in the cloud console and if you hvae the cloud app on your phone, there as well.
> I am not defending them, but this is totally on you.
You are defending them. Unless OP is disingenuous, the reputational loss of an unhappy customer is hard to shake. Customers will make mistakes, if the cloud provider doesn't have automated systems to catch and prevent those mistakes then they aren't doing well in customer service.
A similar thing happened to me with my personal Azure spend, but I felt they handled it much better simply by communicating early and often when there was a problem processing payment. I had time to respond and fix my subscription, so I stayed a happy customer.
Fortunately traditional hosting providers like Hetzner won't suspend me even if I pay $10/month on average. That's why I avoid Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and AWS like a plague. I prefer to have a freedom to switch my hosting provider at any time, even if that sometimes means more infrastructure work. That kind of attitude to customers, as GCP usually has, is just not for me, thanks.
I don't understand you. I have said that Hetzner is not going to suspend my account (or deprive me of customer support) on the grounds of paying too little per month. What kind of data point you need? I am the data point. I'm their customer since 2015.
The general point I was trying to make is not an advertisement of particular hosting provider, but the fact that traditional hosting providers are totally fungible. If tomorrow this company goes bonkers and starts doing stupid things, then I just migrate to OVH, DigitalOcean, Vultr or any other competitor on this market. But unlike traditional hosting providers, there is no market among big cloud providers, as they are not fungible on the customer API level, so each of them is actually a monopoly. And monopoly is generally no good for customers. The rest can be deduced from this principle.
I wouldn't say that... there are a LOT of sites that operate at under $1k/month spend. If you lose 10k customers for one big fish, is it worth it? I know it's not apples to apples, but still can really matter. And just maybe it's not worth supporting a bigger player in that case altogether.
And for the bigger fish, if it's me, I'm one to push for complete containerization and orchestration beyond simple DBAS service for PostgreSQL, depending on needs for scale. Which absolutely means switching can be easy enough.
The only advantage the big cloud providers have is the services for the lower-middle tier customers.
I've just coded my latest site using aws but I'm going to be teaching myself terraform in the coming week so I can rewrite the infrastructure as code so I can move providers easily if I ever have any problems in the future.
Terraform is not going to make you cloud-agnostic. If you switch cloud providers, you'll still use Terraform but you will have to rewrite much, if not all, of your TF code.
And even if I don't, I imagine rewriting a terraform workflow is probably easier than taking cloudformation code and then rewriting it into whatever the equivalent is in google or microsoft land. Atm I'm pretty happy with aws and don't see myself moving but I like to have the option if needed.
If you can be banned from the platform at any time just for having the audacity of using your credit card, maybe they should have a big yellow warning box when signing up with a credit card
Google's data suite (bigquery, ai) is unmatched imo but I agree -- prod realtime apps shouldn't run on gcp. Google has proved time and time again that they have awful support. I've seen plenty of gcp incidents and every support thread is them gaslighting that the customer is wrong, gcp had no issues. One time we had our dependencies on Google breaking and google suite reported the outage but gcp didn't, gcp support still tried to deny that gcp had any issues.
It's funny that AWS support isn't super great absolutely, but relatively boy their support is amazing. They will at least acknowledge there was an issue on their end.
YES! Everyone should read this. Google Cloud will shutdown your servers for the slightest stupid reason. NEVER EVER run any production apps with Google Cloud.
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"gaslighting that the customer is wrong, gcp had no issues"
YES this is my experience except in my case they didn't gaslight me and instead avoid giving a resolution.
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I run a business that hundreds of paying customers (ecom stores) relies on and I'm a 4 yrs customer with Google Cloud.
They shutdown all my servers last Friday for the slightest stupid reason and don't give a fuck to rectify things fast. 3 days now and they still haven't gave me a resolution.
On paper, my servers were shutdown for at least more than 72 hrs and it's still ongoing.
In these discussions I rarely see Apple Maps mentioned, but I just checked and MapKit JS includes 25,000 requests per day with a $99 yearly Apple Developer subscription. Considering the cost of the alternatives, even if you don’t care about iOS development, it might be worth it to get one just for MapKit.
This has been transformative for the project[0] I'm working on where I need to host a lot of ocean environment data using vector tiles. I've been able to build out a data upload and tiling pipeline similar to Felt using tippecanoe + pmtiles without a lot of trouble. It's so cheap to run and host we intend to provide a data hosting service free to our users with a reasonable soft limits. Using something like MapBox Tiling Service would have been a couple orders of magnitude more expensive and make the project infeasible. Really exciting stuff.
The thing this article doesn't say is that maplibre-gl v2 supports directly querying pmtiles with http range requests so you don't even need lambda or cloud flare workers to make x/y/z routes in front of the file. So instead of 50c, this is essentially free.
If you are going to to set up that infrastructure you could just use an mbtiles file which has been around for years.
The interesting thing to me is that this stuff is all built on the open source technology of mapbox, and it seems like a real threat to large parts of their business model. Interested to see how it plays out.
The solution I described in the blog post is an optional layer on top designed for high traffic deployments, see here: https://protomaps.com/docs/cdn
As most storage systems like S3 aren't free and have per-request fees, the price is pretty comparable to this CDN deployment.
Protomaps is very intentionally built with little in common with Mapbox; the main shared parts are using the same Protocol Buffers vector tile format, because there's no reason to write another one; and compatibility with the fork of Mapbox GL 1 (MapLibre GL). See https://protomaps.com/docs/faq#mapbox
Firstly, I just want to say thanks for the reply, but more so thanks for your work, its moving opensource mapping forward.
In my work we are looking at switching from mbtiles hosted with tilserver-gl(https://github.com/maptiler/tileserver-gl) to pmtiles to remove a server process. But we were self hosting already and we are already using maplibre-gl 2.
I can see why the implementation in the blog post would be better for high traffic deployments (ours isn't). It also points out to me I don't understand how a CDN would handle range request for hosting the pmtiles file directly, it probably doesn't?
As far as the mapbox stuff,in my mind, pmtiles is a direct competitor (successor) to the mbtiles format, which was a revolution in comparison to everything that came before it. A successor I welcome because it makes it even easier for me as a developer to self host and not be dependent on a SaaS to run my maps.
The modern opensource map stack wouldn't exist without mapbox and I'm personally grateful to them for that. Most people who use pmtiles will use mapbox's opensource style spec to style them, and descendants of their open source code to render them. But as a developer now its an obvious choice to not use their services after years of using them.
However I'm not doing high traffic stuff and they never made much money off me anyway.
Some CDNs handle range requests; the purpose of introducing Lambda/Workers here is to transform normal Z/X/Y URLs into range requests, so you can use PMTiles with any client like MapLibre Native or legacy code without loading a plugin.
Protomaps actually has its own vector renderer different from Mapbox GL or MapLibre at https://github.com/protomaps/protomaps.js . It does use a handful of low-level Mapbox JavaScript libraries, but otherwise was consciously developed to be 100% separate from existing Mapbox rendering and styling code, and has an objectively inferior (Leaflet) user experience.
In practice, most serious uses of Protomaps are now using MapLibre GL, so there will be more focus going on that in the project going forward.
My guess is Mapbox would worry more about competitors in the routing and Addressing space than
The biggest danger with Open tiles is a basemap is the gateway to other data services with higher costs and an easier path to a defendable technical moat. Swapping a basemap can literally be a 10 minute job
Can any of you suggest a nice tutorial or something for rendering maps for self-hosting at much higher zoom levels? Many of these examples are for larger areas where zoom level 10 is sufficient, but I make hobby maps of mountain bike / hiking trails where the displayed area is only ~10km wide at the most with lots of fine detail. Thus, my maps tend to be shown at zoom levels 12-18, which is much higher than any of the free tilesets.
(Ideally I'd like to take a sane style, tweak some things like making paths clearer and offsetting the text labels, then making tiles. The Thunderforest maps are exactly what I want, but tiny and local and self-hosted.)
Most of these examples go up to zoom 10 or so because they cover a wide area. It's not prohibitive to increase that zoom in a small area because the total number of tiles will still be low. Also keep in mind that for vector data it's possible to "overzoom" and allow the client zoom levels to be higher than the physical data levels.
In terms of self hosted maps for outdoors use, I have some open source repos from a few years ago that may help with that. [0] is a style based on the openmaptiles vector tile schema for outdoors purposes. I believe that readme has some overall instructions, plus other repos in the org are for making data. (Nowadays planetiler is probably the best way to make OSM vector tiles though)
This basemap looks awesome. Need to play with this and see how hard is to run it on my own. It would totally fit nicely with my website https://travelermap.net.
I agree it's very reasonable to have highly zoomed small area stuff, I just seem to be missing the gap between the OSM data and the tiles. I'll give that a read, thank you!
You might want to peek at https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway . I have never used it myself, but it at least shows how to integrate the different pieces.
The individual software components often have alternative with a similar scope. So if you don't like a choice headwaymaps made, browse around.
The data sources are mostly "unique", i.e. everybody downloads from the pages (Geofabrik, Who's On First, etc), so not much to gain here.
Editing styles has some alternatives, but the OpenSource editors are far away from the quality of the Mapbox editor. Maputnik or editing the 1000+ SLOC JSON by hand are the way to go, imo.
Personally I use GeoFabrik to download OSM extracts → osmconvert to extract the smaller bounding box I am interested in → tilemaker to render vector tiles to individual .pbf files I can serve like it's 1999. The bounding box extract is not necessary, but it's much faster if you need to tweak things in tilemaker. Both tilemaker and osmconvert are packaged for at least Debian out of the box, so setup is easy enough. Rendering a decently sized metro area takes < 30mins with this from scratch of compute, < 5min with the bounding box extract.
Note that adding icons (sprites) or fonts is extra work that comes on top. And while the tools themselves are great, there's still a lot of gluing/plumbing/fitting things together that you'll need to do. If headwaymaps works for you, it's probably the easiest choice.
I'm not sure of exactly what you need but a few years ago I toyed with my own OSM server. There was a tuto on a site named linuxbabe to install everything on Ubuntu.
FWIW I generated all the tiles up to zoom 18 for France (which is the best mapped country as far as OSM go), it represented about 300 GB of data.
You will need a big SSD, 16 GB ram for a big country, 32 GB for Europe, I think you can do the world with 64 GB but ofc more is always better.
Count a few weeks to generate everything, probably less if you have a very good computer / server (mine was quite old, 2012ish I think).
Thanks, but that's the problem, the data downloads they offer are not zoomed enough. So I want to know how to go closer. This presumes you already have tiles.
The z0-14 tilesets from https://app.protomaps.com/downloads/small_map should be good enough for street-level mapping with overzooming. You can email me at brandon@protomaps.com if this doesn't fit your needs yet.
Thanks, I'll give it a look, but I need a different style as well. This is the sort of thing I'm looking to completely self-host: https://trailmaps.app/ramba/
Can someone give a better description of how this initiative relates to OpenStreetMaps? The website says that the "tile dataset [is] based on OpenStreetMap data" - so, what's the added value in the commercial tier? And - how, if at all, does this initiative contribute back to OSM as a project?
> OpenStreetMap ... standard tile layer ... openstreetmap-carto ... is based on dynamic rendering of raster images, instead of vector tiles that can be customized on the client.
so, does OSM really not make vector tiles available? That's too bad.
OSM is really a dataset. They do offer a raster tile server, but it's intended to support community mapping (improving the dataset), and not necessarily for end users using a map for other purposes.
Basically they want you to host your own tile server using the OSM dataset. There are also commercial offerings that do this for you, but not for free.
Tiles, vector or raster, to be consumed for general use are not really in the scope of the OpenStreetMap project. This is surprising to many because it's the first thing you see on OSM.org; the tiles there are for the explicit purpose of feedback to data editors, and make a best-effort to synchronize the instantaneous state of the database in the tiles, unlike Protomaps which delivers a snapshot.
It can use openstreetmap as a data source and probably most people self hosting their maps will end up using openstreetmap data and maybe some of their own data. IMHO this is more interesting for people that want bespoke maps as it gives them a cheap way to do that without having to rely on expensive SAAS solutions or a lot of operational complexity.
Openstreetmap doesn't really do a lot for hosting maps for third party websites. You would use Mapbox, maptiler or other suppliers for that and libraries such as mapbox/maplibre, openlayers, leaflet etc. that can render either bitmap or vector maps.
The trick with protomaps is that instead of deploying gazillions of tile files, you upload a huge single file with all the vector content inside and then use lambda functions to extract tiles from that file. And then you use caching and CDNs to to make sure you don't have a lot of compute overhead . So, the API looks like a normal tile server. The data deployment process boils down to uploading a new file and your usage data is a little bit of compute for the tiles your users ask for and a networking cost related to using a CDN.
So, that adds up to a lot of savings potentially. At least, as long as commercial providers don't lower their cost. Obviously, they are free to do similar things technically.
This looks absolutely fantastic. I've been tinkering around off and on with the Strava API, laying my (or my bike club's) ride lines on top of a map to share with friends. Doing this with Google Maps has been more costly than I expected. I'll check this out after work!
This is great. I hadn't heard of it but currently building a research mapping interface for a non-profit and will use it. Interested to know if anyone has suggestions for public aeriel/ satellite tiles. I use ESRI via a dev account which is largely great (extensive hi-res) / best value (??) I've found so far - in a semi exhaustive search. Also the Allen Coral Atlas basemap, CC'd from Planet, which is limited to reefs (and 5m) but fantastic for the mission, not just the licensing. But I'm sure there are alternative solutions. Not in need of up-to-date imagery, but would love to find e.g. a publically released AWS tileset that is updated on a biyearly basis or so ... Am I asking too much :))
Pretty cool demo, what I wonder about is how the quality is and how long they can keep updating their tiles. My experience last time I did something similar was that the OSM data grows fast, the import and rendering takes longer and longer, and something tends to break in the process or create rendering problems in some random countries if you don't spend time checking.
A more obvious quality issue for example: on their demo, Arabic text renders wrong (left to right instead of right to left, it'd be like printing kroY weN instead of New York)
Does anyone know whether OpenAddresses is actually usable for an API?
A few years back, I built something to do reverse geocoding based on Google Maps's prices. I never actually released it because I wasn't confident the coverage was good enough.
I guess it might be worth dusting it off and seeing if someone finds it useful.
I have tried to love the 3rd party maps, but I always go back to Google because of traffic updates. Nothing else comes even remotely close and when you need to get somewhere on time, it's just too crucial.
Author here - the catch is that the data you store and serve is usually not as rich and complete as Google's, of course.
The solution as described in the post is for serving tile archives, and where you get the tile archive is up to you - I have a commercial offering (and am working on an open source one too), and there's various other FOSS projects for tile creation.
PMTiles looks excellent, I think the range request idea will go far.
Just wanted to let you know that the "Live Example Page" link on the page seems to 404.
There isn't a catch. If you only want to serve map tiles, this is the cheapest way to do it.
If you want fancy features like being able to use a UI to make custom map styles, vehicle routing and satellite overlay, then MapBox and Google are still your friend.
As the developer of this system, I concur with this; Protomaps is focused on map tiles, and can be used with other solutions such as http://geocode.earth for search.
A small detail: I don't believe this is the absolute cheapest way to deliver map tiles. Renting an unmetered bandwidth server is always going to be the cheapest way to host content, but unmanaged servers don't give you SSL termination, infinite storage, or an edge cache.
Protomaps is designed as the right compromise between self-hosted operational+development costs and SaaS-like delivery.
If you have any geospatial data, you can tile it with tippecanoe [0], which gives you an mbtiles file. Protomaps lets you easily convert the mbtiles file into a protomaps file which you can then use.
Protomaps doesn’t limit you to any particular type of tiles, it’s just a format which allows you to read tiles out of a single file with HTTP range requests.
The Mapbox repo has an older version of tippecanoe; there's a newer version actively being improved by Felt at http://github.com/felt/tippecanoe , and they've also funded my addition of the Protomaps format (PMTiles) as a direct output. No conversion step required anymore!
I have tested Protomaps in of my project and I can say this is good as tileset datasource. E.g. if you already have some map data in your app and needs basemap to display under them Protomaps is your solution.
The catch is that you have to host it yourself (which is pain if you want to update it - otherwise it's just upload and forget).
OSM needs no data plan, just the GPS signal and updated maps downloaded from
either Organic Maps (the easy way); or OSMand, if you plan to do serious tasks on mapping your town for instace.
> A web application with 50,000 map loads using the Google Maps API will cost $350 per month.
> A similar amount of traffic running through a Protomaps CDN install on Cloudflare, with an average of 20 tiles per session, costs fifty cents in Cloudflare Workers request fees.
$350 versus $0.50! Who's going to be the first to build a (maybe Google Maps-compatible?) API on top of this and sell it for a fraction of the cost?
Edit: Looked around a bit and Protomaps already offers a hosted map through Github Sponsors here: https://github.com/sponsors/protomaps