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Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world

protomaps.com

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Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world

#91
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kinda sad how we need open source alternatives to MapBox, the formerly open source company.

Mapbox is still the best choice where a polished suite of mapping APIs is a better fit for a project. Mapbox is a venture-backed company with a SaaS business model, and has never been open source in total - it used to be open core with a FOSS frontend and proprietary backend. This SaaS model is absolutely the best way to fund huge companies and give investors a return. Mapbox has also done the bulk of innovation in o…

> The ideal software economy is one in which innovators capture a good portion of the wealth they create.

Beg to differ, the ideal software economies maximally empowers end-users at the absolute minimal cost. Innovators can and should leave substantial cash on the table. They should see themselves as stewards of a public good.

Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world

#92
post #82

I just used their pmtiles tool to grab a map of just the area around Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco. I grabbed the latest macOS Go binary from https://github.com/protomaps/go-pmtiles/releases I found a rough bounding box using http://bboxfinder.com/#37.373977,-122.593346,37.570977,-122.... Then I ran this: pmtiles extract https://build.protomaps.com/20231023.pmtiles hmb.pmtiles \ --bbox=-122.593346,37.373977,-…

That's really cool. Cloud be really use full for local businesses. They often embed Google maps, but I feels like having a map from the local are would be sufficient, and cheaper.

Wouldn’t they need to keep updating this from time to time to stay current? That would likely kill any savings pretty quickly.

Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really cool. Cloud be really use full for local businesses. They often embed Google maps, but I feels like having a map from the local are would be sufficient, and cheaper.

Wouldn’t they need to keep updating this from time to time to stay current? That would likely kill any savings pretty quickly.

Protomaps generates daily world files I believe [1] but I haven't confirmed that they're used by the download tool yet. In theory you can download the data everyday to pick up updates.

[1] https://maps.protomaps.com/builds/

Edit: re-reading top comment it looks like they're using a daily file so you'd just have to create a cron job

Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world

#94
I really wish there was a PMTile implementation for MapLibreGL Native like there is for the JS side (I believe the JS side actually has a way to add arbitrary data protocols). Of course I could stand up some sort of worker or function to sit in the middle, but having this all work client side on Android and iOS would be a game changer for me!

Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world

#95
post #91
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mapbox is still the best choice where a polished suite of mapping APIs is a better fit for a project. Mapbox is a venture-backed company with a SaaS business model, and has never been open source in total - it used to be open core with a FOSS frontend and proprietary backend. This SaaS model is absolutely the best way to fund huge companies and give investors a return. Mapbox has also done the bulk of innovation in o…

> The ideal software economy is one in which innovators capture a good portion of the wealth they create. Beg to differ, the ideal software economies maximally empowers end-users at the absolute minimal cost. Innovators can and should leave substantial cash on the table. They should see themselves as stewards of a public good.

[deleted]

Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world

#97

> The Google Maps API has a generous free tier, but high fees past 30,000 map loads. Protomaps is designed from the ground up to be a system you run yourself - as a 100% static backend on cloud storage - so you only incur the usage costs of storing and serving that data, which can be pennies for moderate usage. It would be interesting to see a cost comparison: recommended hosting setup vs Google Maps, and at what poi…

Cloudflare: 100GB hosting is $1 and $.36 for 10 million requests.

If you read the Protomaps docs it explains how to cache the requests on Cloudflare CDN so you only have to pay for each tile request once per cache period. It's quite cheap.

Edit: previous submission title for Protomaps: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API

Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world

#98

I wonder if Github Pages supports HTTP range. Obviously putting a multi-GB blob on there would probably be abuse, but a small blob limited to a small region with limited detail would be really nice for having a map to accompany a blog post or something.

I used it for this hospital accessibility map of Maryland. Sorry the legend looks terrible on mobile though

https://wcedmisten.github.io/nextjs-protomap-demo/isochrone

Re: Protomaps – A free and open source map of the world

#99

I'm confused, isn't it just openstreetmaps? I must be missing something.

OpenStreetMap is the data they use. Other software usually fetch tiles (images) to display, but here they built a single and much smaller file from OSM data which is rendered directly by clients.
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