[thomas_raff]

Cool project. How would I use another map layer (don't have a google maps api key)? And why did you deploy to Heroku and not to AWS/GCP/Azure?

[kdeorah]

Yes you could use MapTiler or Mapbox or a React component for any other map. Google is most popular and therefore added to sample.

Heroku is the easiest to get up and running with. PaaS over raw store/compute when you are getting started.