OpenStreetMap is amazing. Based on my research, most paid mapping services get expensive quickly with any serious load, even if you're just geocoding addresses

OpenStreetMap is amazing. Based on my research, most paid mapping services get expensive quickly with any serious load, even if you're just geocoding addresses. Also, if you want to do anything interesting with the data you're probably going to run afoul of your license agreement that says you can't combine their mapping data with data from other sources. It opens up so many possibilities for small developers to create large scale mapping services that would have been prohibitively expensive or otherwise impossible. They also make it really easy to put together a quick proof-of-concept by hosting their APIs on numerous public servers with generous usage terms and no registration. I'm working on a project right now that wouldn't be possible without OSM, for multiple reasons, so I definitely agree with the article's premise.