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Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

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Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#41

Post by mistrial9 »

l3x wrote: post #39
jenny91 wrote: post #32

I 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

ok except "full planet datasets" make little sense for terrestrial features. Splitting .. aka sharding the files into basic continents would make SO much sense. Asia is big, but no requests for Africa mixed in.. Australia would be manageable?

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#42

Post by hyperknot »

jszymborski wrote: post #34
wongarsu wrote: post #31

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 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.

I definitely not want to charge for requests, that's the founding principle of this project.

And the risk of this project is largely mitigated by offering the full repo as open-source, so you can always self host this if needed.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#43

Post by hyperknot »

wongarsu wrote: post #31

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 off…

Do you think it'd be more clear to only accept donations on GitHub Sponsors and only offer actual support plans on the website? I mean actual email support, helping companies migrate their existing map stack to OpenFreeMap.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#44

Post by hyperknot »

mistrial9 wrote: post #41
l3x wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

ok except "full planet datasets" make little sense for terrestrial features. Splitting .. aka sharding the files into basic continents would make SO much sense. Asia is big, but no requests for Africa mixed in.. Australia would be manageable?

PMTiles could come up with a version in the future where instead of one 90 GB file, they have 9 thousand 10 MB files. That would work well I believe.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#45

Post by wongarsu »

hyperknot wrote: post #42
jszymborski wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I definitely not want to charge for requests, that's the founding principle of this project. And the risk of this project is largely mitigated by offering the full repo as open-source, so you can always self host this if needed.

If you don't want to charge per request, you could also offer two pools of backend servers: free servers that are provided on a best-effort basis with fair-use-policy, and paid servers that are exclusive to people in the $150/month plan.

The latter should be easier to manage with more predictable traffic, while giving you more leeway to deal with abuse on the free servers if it ever becomes an issue.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#46

Post by 3np »

hyperknot wrote: post #43
wongarsu wrote: post #31

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 off…

Do you think it'd be more clear to only accept donations on GitHub Sponsors and only offer actual support plans on the website? I mean actual email support, helping companies migrate their existing map stack to OpenFreeMap.

Would be super cool if you have a bitcoin and/or monero option. Even if just address for donations and not as payment for support.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#48

Post by hyperknot »

jenny91 wrote: post #32

I 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…

So Protomaps is a really full stack map platform, they are competing with kind of like 3-4 projects at once:

- There is the Protomaps schema. It's competing with OpenMapTiles and Shortbread (https://shortbread-tiles.org/)

- There is the Protomaps file format. It's competing with MBTiles and say Btrfs images in OpenFreeMap.

- There is the Protomaps styles. It's competing with OSM Liberty and OSM Bright styles (https://github.com/maputnik/osm-liberty)

- There is the way to host the tiles, on CloudFlare workers, range requests, etc. It's competing with MBTiles servers or OpenFreeMap's nginx servers.

About getting abuse, how do you imagine it gets abuse? It's a static file showing OpenStreetMap data.

I mean traffic is the only thing what can be a problem, but I think Hetzner should be good till 30-100 TB per server.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#50

Post by hyperknot »

wongarsu wrote: post #45
hyperknot wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely not want to charge for requests, that's the founding principle of this project. And the risk of this project is largely mitigated by offering the full repo as open-source, so you can always self host this if needed.

If you don't want to charge per request, you could also offer two pools of backend servers: free servers that are provided on a best-effort basis with fair-use-policy, and paid servers that are exclusive to people in the $150/month plan. The latter should be easier to manage with more predictable traffic, while giving you more leeway to deal with abuse on the free servers if it ever becomes an issue.

Yes, I was thinking about that, it might actually be a good idea. Provide a premium service with SLAs, while providing the SLA-less service for free, with two pool of servers.
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