I understand you don't plan to make money, only to cover costs. Nevertheless, I believe you would benefit from a more explicit "business plan". Your Gold support plan kind of fulfills that purpose (email support and an invoice), but right now it's kind of hidden in the middle of a donation request, and flavored as a donation. You might convince a lot more mba-type people to support you if you also extend the same offer under a heading like "business plan" (where you make it clear that commercial use is free, but you can subscribe to this totally-not-a-donation plan for email support)
Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting
31–40 of 243 posts
Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting
#32I really like the idea.
Why OMT instead of protomaps? The latter is clearly where the community is moving towards (albeit very slowly).
I'm somewhat sceptical about the "free with no API keys" idea. I guess your service is not guaranteed to be up so no one too big will rely on it. But what if you start getting abuse or someone using them on some humongous site (e.g. one of those cheap restaurant email builders that always embed a map), and you start getting way too much traffic from random sources and websites. What would you do?
Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting
#33Seems like a great service!
We could definitely consider this as an viable option for our startup's application.
I am not an expert regarding the OSM data and maps in general, but how customizable is your library, can I somehow relatively easy add housenumbers of the addresses from OSM data on the buildings in the map?
Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting
#34I understand you don't plan to make money, only to cover costs. Nevertheless, I believe you would benefit from a more explicit "business plan". Your Gold support plan kind of fulfills that purpose (email support and an invoice), but right now it's kind of hidden in the middle of a donation request, and flavored as a donation. You might convince a lot more mba-type people to support you if you also extend the same off…
I second making a very generous free tier, and then charging reasonably for more requests in wide buckets.
As a user, free or paid, it'd give me a lot more faith in this living past tomorrow.
Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting
#35Looks great love the free tiles and no limits or API keys. Question, why use btrfs?
So a full planet OSM extract is about 300 million binary files, in total about 90 GB. The most popular ways to store it:
- MBTiles - an SQLite file, each file is a row in a table, you need a server to serve it.
- PMTiles - a single file, optimised for serverless usage.
- Extract them into a directory, which in practice should be on a partition image. This is the approach I choose.
I tested ext4 and Btrfs and I choose Btrfs. The reason is how ext4 and Btrfs handles inodes. Btrfs handles inodes so much better compared to ext4, it doesn't allocate them at start and also allows putting tiny files right with the metadata.
Because here the average tile size is only 405 bytes, most of the tiles can actually stored with the Btrfs metadata block. From the latest run:
Btrfs data is 51.57GiB
Btrfs metadata is 84.37GiB
Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting
#36I absolutely love this project and had a similar idea on my todo list for a while because I agree there should be at least one free open map provider with a developer friendly stack.
If you want free servers/bandwidth around the world, hit me up. My email is in my profile.
Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting
#37FYI if you need a CDN you can get bulk pricing from fastly with a monthly commitment. I'm not sure if their hosting works for you because you might be serving byte ranges. I think we're paying 2k/month usd for like 300TB/month. Backblaze-to-fastly is free, so no egress. Love your project, more power to you. I'll be using this for a few side projects for sure.
At Hetzner, the bandwidth is unlimited in theory. In practice, there are stories of terminating accounts of those who used too much. I don't think this project will ever make $2k per month. TBH, I'd be happy it it ever reaches $200 per month. I have to be very careful about what hosting providers to use and CDNs are out of the question.
I don't think it's still offered anywhere in the web interface, but Hetzner offers servers with 10Gbit uplink, with traffic charged at 1€/TB. Depending on resource usage this can be more cost effective than renting multiple servers, and paying for your traffic should prevent account termination for excessive traffic use.
https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/network/10g-...
Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting
#38I absolutely love this project and had a similar idea on my todo list for a while because I agree there should be at least one free open map provider with a developer friendly stack. If you want free servers/bandwidth around the world, hit me up. My email is in my profile.
Thanks a lot for the offer, I'll definitely reach out!
Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting
#39I really like the idea. Why OMT instead of protomaps? The latter is clearly where the community is moving towards (albeit very slowly). I'm somewhat sceptical about the "free with no API keys" idea. I guess your service is not guaranteed to be up so no one too big will rely on it. But what if you start getting abuse or someone using them on some humongous site (e.g. one of those cheap restaurant email builders that a…
From the FAQs on GitHub [1]
> What about PMTiles?
> I would have loved to use PMTiles; they are a brilliant idea!
> Unfortunately, making range requests in 80 GB files just doesn't work in production. It is fine for files smaller than 500 MB, but it has terrible latency and caching issues for full planet datasets.
> If PMTiles implements splitting to [1] https://github.com/hyperknot/openfreemap
Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting
#40I really like the idea. Why OMT instead of protomaps? The latter is clearly where the community is moving towards (albeit very slowly). I'm somewhat sceptical about the "free with no API keys" idea. I guess your service is not guaranteed to be up so no one too big will rely on it. But what if you start getting abuse or someone using them on some humongous site (e.g. one of those cheap restaurant email builders that a…
From the FAQs on GitHub [1] > What about PMTiles? > I would have loved to use PMTiles; they are a brilliant idea! > Unfortunately, making range requests in 80 GB files just doesn't work in production. It is fine for files smaller than 500 MB, but it has terrible latency and caching issues for full planet datasets. > If PMTiles implements splitting to [1] https://github.com/hyperknot/openfreemap
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