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?
On top of a custom protomaps tileset and a few other MapTiler options (such as satellite and hiking), it packs a search engine, a basic OSM place UI, transit calculators (walk, bike with profiles, transit, car), small features like ruler and favorites, transit maps, photos of places, place search by categories, and the French open source street view Panoramax.
Of course, given the scope, its alpha software.
It's built locally for France and French speaking users, though most of the code is English, some data sets are not. I'm spending ~ 50 % working on transit, lots need to be done.
You can test it here : https://cartes.app.
The aim is not to provide map tiles as an API to other project, but to build a UI on it.
We used to host our own mbtiles map for like $11/mo, but the problem was (this was prior to planetiler and people generating public worldwide mbtile dumps) there wasn't a free/cheap source for regularly-updated mbtiles. The dump from OpenMapTiles was not updated for years.
So we gave up and went to mapbox, where we regularly exceed the monthly free tier for web, but they give us a discount. Because that is a scary scenario and we are dying to pay a fixed monthly fee, I think we will try yours and donate!
Slightly off topic, but how come there doesn't seem to be any open projects using the Overture maps data?
> Overture is a data-centric map project, not a community of individual map editors. Therefore, Overture is intended to be complementary to OSM. We combine OSM with other sources to produce new open map data sets. Overture data will be available for use by the OpenStreetMap community under compatible open data licenses. Overture members are encouraged to contribute to OSM directly.
Sounds like it would be a good data source, or am I missing something?
I know nothing about mapping, but I’ve always had a dream of making a private neighborhood map which labels each house with people, sort of like a visual Rolodex. It would be great to have property boundaries, too. Do you have any suggestions for places to start? I don’t even know what file formats would hold this sort of data.
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.
edit to fix typo
If you want free servers/bandwidth around the world, hit me up. My email is in my profile.
The back-end is currently based on a postgis database and a python app serving geojson tiles at zoom level 16. It currently runs on a single Hetzner server due to the resource requirements of imposm which is used to import the data into the database. Reducing hosting costs would really help us to insure the long term sustainability of the app.
I don't know yet how different the schema is and how easy it will be to support.
Soundscape was originally a Microsoft research project but they open sourced it when they shut down the app last year.
I'm currently using Stadia Map Tiles from when they went from free to paid.
If I'm understanding you correctly, I can switch to your instance to serve tiles to my site for free once again? I'm very happy to pitch in some cash to help keep the servers running.
I am running leaflet.js and I guess I should be able to figure out how to migrate, but if you already have a tutorial somewhere, please let me know.
This is really cool.
It's for a hobby project that's outlasted well-funded projects, so the traffic kept increasing as competitors folded.
A few years back, I tried to run my own tileserver, but the difficulty of creating an updated vector tileset put me off, and I just continued paying the Google tax. Last month I finally got a really nasty bill, and it forced me to cancel my weekend plans and change to Mapbox.
I like Mapbox for its other API features, but I'm wondering if I could alternate between this and Mapbox, so I keep my overall costs lower. I'd prefer to donate a fixed amount instead.
Question: Does anyone have experience with switching the underlying OSM mapping services either programmatically or by webpage? I'm more asking around the end-user experience. I suppose I have to check what features of mapbox-gl 2+ I use that won't be available in the libre forks.
Slightly off-topic, one thing I'm having a hard time finding is satellite imagery. I need to self-host an offline web application using CesiumJS, and while I can spin up a map server, I can't find satellite imagery for free or cheap. I've used MapTiler[0], their server works great and they offer low-res satellite imagery for free/testing, but their high-res images are out of my price range.
Anyone know of resources for downloading offline images of satellite imagery, compatible with OpenFreeMap or other server for use with CesiumJS? Doesn't have to be super recent images but would be nice.
Last year I made a website for my gf where I had to build a custom map of Paris, and I struggled a lot trying to figure out how to actually make a map from scratch while avoiding paid services like mapbox.
I finally managed to hack something up using openstreetmap data, then some manual work in QGIS to customize the look, and voila - I had a bunch of folders filled with raster tiles.
This site is deployed for free on Netlify and is basically just a React SPA, a public folder with tiles, and I give the tile URL template to the OpenLayers lib to display it all nicely on the screen. Simple and it works!
I always wanted to improve the map a bit by using vector tiles as I think it looks nicer, but I thought you need a dedicated server for that? (unless I'm mistaken, correct me if I'm wrong)
> 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.
Wondering which part incurs the latency here.
With 1TB free traffic from the CDN, and pretty small costs for S3 and Lambda@Edge, it's probably even cheaper to self-host I guess. Even lower costs would be possible by entirely using CloudFlare services (CDN, R2)...
https://i.postimg.cc/tCn1xSRF/image.png
p.s. very cool project indeed
edit: I don't know how it happened, but while panning the map with the mouse, the map flipped upside down.
Question, why use btrfs?
Curious that you describe the OSM Bright style as "abandoned by their upstream project". I see edits 4 months old (https://github.com/openmaptiles/osm-bright-gl-style), but I only looked superficially. Is it really abandoned?
I'm a little curious about the setup bit for (self) hosting - it's essentially a series of bespoke python scripts? Not cloud init, not Ansible - and not shell scripts - nor Terraform/tofu.
Would love to hear a few thoughts of how you arrived at this setup - and if you re-use parts for other projects?
If not, declaring one with IMGui+layers can be done in a week from any experienced C++ programmer. The included demos for OSGEarth already depict a minimal client with impressive 3D maps for a nearly non-supported demo.
I think KDE/Plasma lost a great oportunity there by not adopting OSGEarth.
On a related subject, I remember seeing MapHub sometime ago and I have it in my bookmarks for one of my (forgotten?) projects. Whenever I find some free time I need to sit down and try the free tier to see if it will do what I have in mind.
One thing that tripped me up is the zoom -- the affordance for zoom in/out across most other mapping UIs is via mouse motions -- how come in your demo it's restricted to the +/- buttons? Perhaps I missed something...
Thanks for sharing this, looks very neat.
How does this project compare to Apache Baremaps (incubating)?
I'm writing an application that lets you view historical data, and the problem is that most/all map services show only current data. It would be nice if the map reflected the year of the data we're layering on top.
So if you want to make some money, there's an option for you!