[atombender]

Speaking of, does anyone know a cheaper service than Mapbox and Google Maps for raster tiles?

I have an app that uses Leaflet for rendering, and Mapbox purely for its raster tiles (both plain maps and satellite required). Mapbox has been cheap for us, at about $50/mo. But with the new pricing structure taking effect in December, it's now about $450/mo. I believe Google and Bing are both more expensive than that.

I've been considering setting up OSM, but I'd like to avoid having to run and maintain it.

[bransonf]

If you can find the time to set it up, OpenMapTiles [0] is the way to go. In the long run, you’ll probably save more money than the time it takes to manage.

[0] https://openmaptiles.org/

[atombender]

Interesting, thanks. Unfortunately, those tiles are pretty ugly compared to Mapbox, but it might be an option if I can't find anything else.

Edit: Also it's $1,000 for commercial use, even to use with OSM data?

[bransonf]

You can style the tiles or use your own.

Where did you find the $1000 quote? I know you can have them hosted unlimited for $245/month but I was fairly sure it was free for self-hosted use.

[atombender]

Update: So if you run the server locally and select maps, you're presented with this screen, saying you need a key from openmaptiles.com: https://i.imgur.com/NTb5zIL.jpg.

If you select "commercial product or company web", you're asked to pay for it: https://i.imgur.com/TrAmju4.jpg

If you select any of the non-commercial ones, the newest map data you get is from 2017 (!).

I'm not against paying, but it's not free!

[kylebarron]

Docs for building the tiles yourself are here [0,1]. It's worked really well for me so far. If you want a visual example of self hosted tiles, you can check out my (in progress) website [2]. The tiles are all hosted statically in S3 with cloudflare as a proxy, so it was pretty cheap.

[0]: https://github.com/openmaptiles/openmaptiles/blob/master/REA... [1]: https://github.com/openmaptiles/openmaptiles/blob/master/QUI... [2]: https://nst.guide

[vetinari]

The point is to generate your own; the purchasing option is if you don't want to generate your own, but want something done for you and packaged.

See here: https://openmaptiles.org/docs/generate/generate-openmaptiles...

[atombender]

Thanks, I will look into that. It's not altogether clear from their site — their Docker image basically implies that you're supposed to use their pre-existing datasets, which aren't free.

[atombender]

It's a little unclear to me. But from what I can gather, the basic software can download data from OSM, but if you want hillshading or satellite, you have to get that separately, and it's part of the $1,000 "production package" [1], which is actually $2,048 for businesses, plus $1,024/year for updates.

[1] https://openmaptiles.com/production-package/

[kylebarron]

I have a couple open source repos for generating hillshade and contours (raster and vector, respectively) that I use with my self hosted tiles at nst.guide. The data sources I'm using are US only, though SRTM is a common choice for international Digital Elevation Models.

[0]: https://github.com/nst-guide/hillshade [1]: https://github.com/nst-guide/contours

[atombender]

Awesome, thanks!

[atombender]

Forgot to answer about styling. Yes, looks like custom styles with the production package (which has hillshading, which ends up making the maps look much nicer) is much better. For some reason their main demos don't show off their best map styles.

[dwnoble]

It's only $20/mo for their commercial cloud offering: https://www.maptiler.com/cloud/plans/

[atombender]

Only if you're below 500k raster tile downloads per month. The app I need this for is at 5.5m/mo, so it'd be a little more than $245/mo. Still better than Mapbox, though.

[TomMarius]

Could you send an example of a great looking map?

[atombender]

Mapbox's tiles are very good. I particularly like the hybrid terrain + road mode, which you can see here: https://homes.stltoday.com/search

[kylebarron]

I agree that layer is gorgeous.

I think the best open vector map style is OSM liberty [0]. My fork, which includes my generated hillshade and contours, is here [1].

[0]: https://github.com/maputnik/osm-liberty [1]: https://github.com/nst-guide/osm-liberty/blob/gh-pages/style...

[sciurus]

For anyone curious like me about Mapbox's new pricing structure taking effect now, they're at https://blog.mapbox.com/new-pricing-46b7c26166e7

[baroffoos]

Those prices look good. I remember last time I checked they had a very good free plan but you had to jump right up to the very expensive enterprise plan if you had an internal app even if it was tiny.

[lukeqsee]

We built Stadia Maps to save you the trouble and the expense.

https://stadiamaps.com

Happy to answer any questions! (I’m a cofounder.)

[echelon]

Really unfortunate that Google Stadia has a name collision with y'all. :(

You don't even show up in the "stadia" search results without the term "maps" added.

If it wasn't scary and expensive to sue Google for a name change, this seems like a case of Google (probably unwittingly) crushing your brand and trademark with their own.

Have y'all noticed a decrease in search traffic (or general brand/product awareness) since Google Stadia launched? And if so, do you plan to do anything about it?

Really cool product! Your maps look slick and super clean. :)

[lukeqsee]

Thanks for the kind words! We appreciate it.

> Have y'all noticed a decrease in search traffic (or general brand/product awareness) since Google Stadia launched?

We've actually seen an uptick because of badly placed keyword searches for Stadia.

We also aren't exactly sure the best way to counter it, but we're working on figuring out the best way. We don't really have a legal resource, either, given we didn't have a trademark before Google Stadia came along.

[baroffoos]

Its ok. Stadia is a google product, it wont exist by the end of 2020.

[atombender]

Cool, thanks. Pricing looks good. I'm not able to check out your product because your service appears to be down right now...?

  $ curl 'https://tiles.stadiamaps.com/styles/alidade_smooth.json'
  <html><body><h1>502 Bad Gateway</h1>
  The server returned an invalid or incomplete response.
  </body></html>

Tried from multiple locations to make sure.

[lukeqsee]

Yeah… :(

Very unfortunate timing there. We had a cache server wedge, and the failover mechanism didn't detect it quickly enough. We've diverted traffic manually and are working on bringing the bad region back into the mix after it went down.

Things should be working again now, at least.

[atombender]

Confirmed. Thanks!

[CalRobert]

I've been very happy with Thunderforest and they're pretty cheap. https://www.thunderforest.com/pricing/

[ruffrey]

We are hosting about 150GB of map data, raster and vector, with the following stack: - MapProxy with Redis cache - MapServer for rendering - PostGIS for data storage

[mdasen]

https://stadiamaps.com

Stadia Maps is pretty cheap. $25 gets you 25,000 map views per day or around 750k/month. $100 gets you 250k/day or around 7.5M per month.

[Shakahs]

I went through the various providers and ended up using MapTiler Cloud, it is the cheapest option I know of besides generating and serving your own tiles.

https://www.maptiler.com/cloud/plans/

[joe-mapbox]

Hey, @atombender.

Joe here from the Mapbox billing support team. Feel free to reach out to [e-mail]. We can dig into your implementation with you to see if there are ways to limit your API consumption (and reduce your overall bills).

Things like limiting panning/zooming can help limit the number of tiles your end users load. Fewer tiles -> cheaper invoices

https://docs.mapbox.com/mapbox.js/example/v1.0.0/maxbounds/

There are other options as well. That said, it's hard to know exactly without taking a look at your map specifically. Let us know!

[roelschroeven]

You might have a look at HERE. If your needs fit comfortably in their Freemium plan, it should cost not very much at all.

Their website is quite confusing though, if you ask me. A starting point might be https://developer.here.com/sign-up?create=Freemium-Basic&kee...

[durkie]

I'm in a similar boat, looking to generate my own vector tile static images (basically raster tiles with fractional zoom levels). I use a fair amount of these, and there's no service that lets you cache them (of course). Seems like Mapbox and Maptiler are the only games in town.

[geuis]

Don’t know about cheaper, but Planet (planet.com) offers daily imagery. Worked there a few years ago.