Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API
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Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API
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Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API
#2What’s the catch?
Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API
#3What’s the catch?
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.
Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API
#4What’s the catch?
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.
What if I want to add custom data to the map like say a police crime filter on the top.
Can I still use this? Or do I need felt
Very knew to make sorry
Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API
#5Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What if I want to add custom data to the map like say a police crime filter on the top. Can I still use this? Or do I need felt Very knew to make sorry
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.
Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API
#6What’s the catch?
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.
Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if I want to add custom data to the map like say a police crime filter on the top. Can I still use this? Or do I need felt Very knew to make sorry
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. [0] https://github.com/mapbox/tippecanoe
Hi, thanks for the mention!
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!
Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API
#8The real meat of this story:
> 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
Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API
#9The real meat of this story: > 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…
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:
http://github.com/sponsors/protomaps
But being "Google Maps compatible" will never be possible as long as the Google Maps client library and data are proprietary.
Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API
#10The real meat of this story: > 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…
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: http://github.com/sponsors/protomaps But being "Google Maps compatible" will never be possible as long as the Google Maps client library and data are proprietary.
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.