We founded Stadia Maps to address these two core issues. Most online maps are expensive, and when you have the money, difficult to implement and integrate.
We're starting out with base and static maps and routing. By starting simple, we can offer fair and transparent pricing. As we continue to expand our services (geocoding and satellite maps are on our short list), we will keep a straightforward pricing model.
We believe maps should serve the customer, not the map provider. Some mapping providers display maps with competitors to your business, reviews (that may be fraudulent), or their own logos alongside your data. We believe a well-designed base map is all you need to allow you data to shine. As we expand, we will continue to focus on putting your company and data first.
That's just the beginning; we are working on several simple tools to help business owners and developers utilize maps in their web and mobile applications. Ultimately, we want to enable others to create fantastic mapping experiences.
How
- We strive to provide fairly priced and transparent plans.
- We provide beautiful themes for a variety of contexts.
- We never track* or sell user data.
- We never display reviews or potential competitors (“related” businesses) alongside your data.
- We never display ads on your map.
- We are working on JS libraries to make interactive map design suck less.
*Beyond the necessary details to implement rate limiting and similar technical measures to ensure everyone has a good experience
We've been building stadiamaps.com to help with those table-stakes--affordable, private, and independent mapping services are vital for everyone today.
That being said, projects like this will make it easier for folks to get the basics if they're comfortable with self-hosting. Overall, map tiles are losing their competitive edge and becoming commodities.
These map tiles are based on OpenMapTiles [1], which has a non-commercial side with less-frequent exports of OSM, and a commercial side with frequent updates [2]. The exports can be downloaded as MBTiles (SQLite) databases of vector tiles.
If you're just using tiles, I don't see any difference with Stadia Maps — perhaps price, I don't use OpenMapTiles' commercial services.
Stadia do offer routing using Valhalla, which OpenMapTiles don't offer.
(I have made some small contributions to the open source OpenMapTiles project [result at [3], vector/raster tiles in other projections], but have no connection to the company.)
Correct. We have also contributed to OpenMapTiles, and if you are interested in self-hosting and/or are very cost sensitive, we'd highly recommend checking them out (they also have very affordable hosting if you're just looking for the tiles).
We're also trying to offer value in other areas such as the design, and in additional services. Routing is obviously one of these, and we've got a few more services that that we're working on. We'll be announcing some of these later this year.
Creator here. I maintain https://onthegomap.com as a side project. I originally used Google Maps API but after their price hike switched to OpenStreetMap data. I self-host GraphHopper for routing and tried to self-host OpenMapTiles but gave up and used Stadia Maps since it would have taken over 100 days [1] to generate a map of the world myself. Stadia Maps has been great and I highly recommend them, but the problem continued to nag me, so earlier this year I started prototyping a new way to generate vector tiles faster. The idea worked and ended up being able to generate a ~100GB planet.mbtiles file in as little as 59 minutes on a single c5ad.16xlarge instance with 64 cpus and 128GB RAM (although smaller machines appear to be more economical).
I’m open-sourcing Flatmap today. Let me know what you think, or if you have any suggestions!
I’m surprised nobody has mentioned tiles here. In order for anyone to build products around OSM data you’re probably going to want to render a map. Tile hosting services are costly and I have up last time I tried to find out how you could do it yourself.
Very good job with this. I am working on a similar project and I was wondering if you are planning on hosting your own OSM tiles or using a service (Mapbox is listed, but are you going with that?) ?
Thanks!
I have recently started using a MapTiler which has a great features for a reasonable prices. And also as an osm-based alternative i have to say it has really nice UX.
https://www.maptiler.com
Though I find myself looking for a provider of geocoding and navigation for a freelance project of mine.
I know that I could probably self-host OSRM and OpenMapTiles, but the hardware requirements make using a cloud service feel easier.
At the same time I can't really decide between something like Mapbox and MapTiler (or possibly even cheaper alternatives that I don't know about), since a lot of the APIs feel a bit vendor locked.
On the other hand, it's nice how many options there are, even though the industry feels like it's moving towards vector tiles which perform mich worse for me, albeit look better.
Your own personal map tile server? That's interesting... what are you planning to achieve that you can't just get from openstreetmap.org? Will you run an instance of graphhopper or project-osm alongside?
Really interesting project/product! It's really nice to see new ways of rendering OSM data, and alternative map services.
I am developing another way to run your own map server (without mapnik!) from a low-end computer (https://github.com/jamesrr39/ownmap-app in case you're interested), but a little bit different to you in that I'm currently focusing on rendering raster tiles. I'm really happy I saw this thread, however, I hadn't heard of the OSM Express, MBTiles or PMTiles formats before and was/am rolling my own format, so it's really interesting looking at some ideas from these.
I've build my own tile server map with mapbox gl spec, thx to them, with simple osm features, data about transportation is fair enough to get some basic calculation features, i mean it's a good start, Google maps pricing is insane, if u plan to support thousands of users like us this gonna kill your profitability, we have no money to invest for that part and imo u should be vendor less if u want to develop ur activity til u buisness model works at least
We’re a new startup this year, and one of our goals is transparent and reasonable pricing.
https://stadiamaps.com
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