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Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API

protomaps.com

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Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API

#41

Post by pbronez »

c0nsumer wrote: post #40

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 th…

This might be what you’re looking for:

https://protomaps.com/docs/pmtiles

Looks like protomaps supports up to zoom level 14 for free:

https://app.protomaps.com/downloads/small_map

Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API

#42

Post by einpoklum »

bdon wrote: post #31
einpoklum wrote: post #23

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?

Hi, the value add in the commercial offering on top of raw OSM is described here: https://protomaps.com/docs/faq#openstreetmap I also maintain open source tooling for anyone to replicate and extract OSM on-demand, as well as a free download portal: https://github.com/protomaps/OSMExpress https://app.protomaps.com/downloads

Interesting!

I note that:

> 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.

Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API

#43

Post by [deleted] »

londons_explore wrote: post #14
bdon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most Google Maps client library users use only a few basic features - "display slippy map here with a pin centered on here" type thing. Then just stub out any other API call with "alert('Not implemented, but PR's welcome!')" And as far as webmasters are concerned, switching from google maps to your maps involves just switching out the tag for a different one.

[deleted]

Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API

#44

Post by einpoklum »

gniv wrote: post #27
TotempaaltJ wrote: post #8

The 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…

> $350 versus $0.50! 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.

> local business details

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.

Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API

#45

Post by zild3d »

anthk wrote: post #34
867-5309 wrote: post #25

firstly let's predict when osm will become as universally acceptable as gm

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.

to be fair, doesn't google maps offer the same? Have downloaded offline maps of cities while traveling without a data plan

Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API

#46

Post by maptime »

alexmuro wrote: post #38

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 st…

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

Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API

#47

Post by narrowtux »

gniv wrote: post #27
TotempaaltJ wrote: post #8

The 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…

> $350 versus $0.50! 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.

Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API

#49

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

anthk wrote: post #34
867-5309 wrote: post #25

firstly let's predict when osm will become as universally acceptable as gm

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.

look up streetcomplete and everydoor. They are much more targetted towards helping improve OSM than OSMAND.

Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API

#50

Post by iLoveOncall »

narrowtux wrote: post #47
gniv wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $350 versus $0.50! 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,…

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