[narrowtux]

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.

[iLoveOncall]

In this case you should just use Leaflet and OpenStreetMap for a grand total of $0 per month.

[wcedmisten]

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.

https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/

[ohgodplsno]

Just so you know, I make it a point to report to OSM maintainers any relatively sizeable app using their tile servers, just so they can be banned.

The default OSM tile server is not here to serve your startup.

[narrowtux]

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.

[habi]

> I find openstreetmap way too busy as a backdrop for data.

Fortunately there’s a large selection of background layers for leaflet: http://leaflet-extras.github.io/leaflet-providers/preview/ I quite like CartoDB Positron for as a muted background.

[narrowtux]

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.