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Mapbox is an amazing product, it's super expensive and pretty hard to swallow the bill every month as a small startup, but the product is just so good, their AP
by neom 9y ago
Mapbox is an amazing product, it's super expensive and pretty hard to swallow the bill every month as a small startup, but the product is just so good, their APIs are fantastic. For sure a company to watch, their COO Roy was the COO of Twilio and he knows what he is doing.
- erikb 9y agoCan you name a few usecases where you would pay them? Doesn#t have to include your own.
- neom 9y agoWe build a data store for municipal governments, we have a very light weight data viz tool that allows municipal workers to view the data on a map: http://john.je/mzHm http://john.je/mzHm
- erikb 9y agoAnd why didn't you do it in an open standard data format and just present it on Google Maps?
- vetinari 9y agoGoogle Maps itself isn't exactly open standard... See the woes of OpenLayers, for example.
- erikb 9y agoYes, that's why I put these as two separate points.
- Bedon292 9y agoThe Google Maps API is also more expensive than Mapbox.
- neom 9y agoWe have exportability as a first class citizen, so you can push out to google maps, tableau, esri, carto, etc. Data viz is not our core competency or something we intend to do very much of.
- erikb 9y agoThe downvotes let me assume that people understood this question as a suggestion. But it was really just a question from someone who hasn't looked into that space for 10 years and is curious how it looks like from an expert perspective.
- chewmieser 9y agoFYI your status page is returning an SSL error. Since you're using HSTS, Chrome is blocking the request altogether.
- rmc 9y agoIf you don't want to host your own map tile server?
- Doctor_Fegg 9y agoIf you're strapped for cash, there are some lower-priced alternatives in the OSM ecosystem. https://thunderforest.com/ https://thunderforest.com/ , for example, has map tiles available in vector and raster forms, and https://www.graphhopper.com/ https://www.graphhopper.com/ is a full-featured alternative to the Mapbox routing stack. You can always self-host, too, whether for map rendering or routing or whatever. (Not to detract from Mapbox, whose product line is amazing and who have some of the smartest engineers out there.)
- kevincennis 9y agoMapzen is also excellent (although definitely less mature than Mapbox), and a huge chunk of their stack is open source.
- drewda 9y agoAt Mapzen, all our code is open source, from front-end UIs to back-end "glue." Have a look at: - web and mobile SDKs: http://github.com/mapzen/ http://github.com/mapzen/ - map rendering library: http://github.com/tangrams http://github.com/tangrams - map tiles: https://github.com/tilezen/ https://github.com/tilezen/ - routing/navigation: https://github.com/valhalla/ https://github.com/valhalla/ - public transit: https://github.com/transitland/ https://github.com/transitland/ - search/geocoding: http://github.com/pelias http://github.com/pelias - gazetteer: https://github.com/whosonfirst https://github.com/whosonfirst FWIW, we do have a few private repos, to protect some ops internals as well as upcoming blog posts. (I work at Mapzen -- and am also a happy user of Mapbox's open-source libraries.)
- kevincennis 9y agoYup. I've checked out a bunch of those – and have actually contributed to pelias/api (and a dependency, addressit). Everything I've seen so far has been clean and pretty easy to follow. Really appreciate the work you all do. I'm a very happy Mapzen customer.
- arctux 9y ago
- lemonlyman516 9y agoMapbox actually just changed their pricing structure to be more friendly to startups and developers - take a look https://blog.mapbox.com/pay-as-you-go-new-flexible-pricing-options-2dabaed65ae1 https://blog.mapbox.com/pay-as-you-go-new-flexible-pricing-o...
- tuukkah 9y agoVector tiles that you can self-host, cache, download for offline use etc.: https://openmaptiles.org https://openmaptiles.org