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They used to be low-cost _and_ open source. Now they're source available and not interested in anything but big clients. I was using Mapbox for all my clients

They used to be low-cost _and_ open source. Now they're source available and not interested in anything but big clients. I was using Mapbox for all my clients before their unopen sourcing, and I tried reaching out three times to ask about options for one of my clients. It wouldn't have been a huge amount of money, probably a few hundred per month, but they never, ever reply. That client wasn't even using any of their server resources, they are 100% self hosted, it's just that Mapbox now charges even for using their client. Anyways, I was trying to give them money, and they wouldn't even acknowledge I exist. I switched that client over to Maplibre and never looked back. The other thing that annoys me is that they've more or less abandoned all their open source repos without even as much of a notice in the README. All these amazing tools sitting there with open pull requests and no one responding for years. If they just did a clean break, put a notice on everything they weren't going to touch again, it would have been a lot better/easier for the community to fork and move on with their lives.

shawn-butler 4y ago
Mapbox was born from open source tools & culture. They were always active and supporting at FOSS4G. I wonder what has changed?
- jonas21 4y ago
  VC funding? I think they were funded mostly by grants and their own revenues for the first few years. Then they started taking VC money (over $300M to date).
  - dataviz1000 4y ago
    They were once Development Seed [0], a company that specialized in making geo spatial visualizations for the UN, NGOs and nonprofits. Development Seed was a large contributor of code and modules to Drupal 6 which they left. In the beginning, their open source mapping and geo spatial visualizations projects were mostly funded by grants from the Knight Foundation which funded news related projects. MapBox came from an in-house tool they developed to create and manage map overlay tiles. (I could be making this all up.) [0] https://developmentseed.org/ https://developmentseed.org/
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  It's a really hard product to make profitable. The hosting and bandwidth costs are huge, and most of your customers (by raw count and nominal usage) are hobbyists or free products unwilling to pay even a few cents per user.
  - lukeqsee 4y ago
    It's hard, but certainly not impossible. Hosting and bandwidth are key inputs to your costs, but they are manageable.
  - Tostino 4y ago
    There is distributed hosting tech for this type of thing at this point. Use it. You could even go old-school BitTorrent, it's been around for decades.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- NelsonMinar 4y ago
  2017, Mapbox Raises $164M in Series C Financing: https://www.finsmes.com/2017/10/mapbox-raises-164m-in-series-c-financing.html https://www.finsmes.com/2017/10/mapbox-raises-164m-in-series... It's gone poorly since then though. SoftBank SPAC hunts new merger partner as Mapbox deal falters: https://news.sky.com/story/softbank-spac-hunts-new-merger-partner-as-mapbox-deal-falters-12344967 https://news.sky.com/story/softbank-spac-hunts-new-merger-pa...

shawn-butler 4y ago

Mapbox was born from open source tools & culture. They were always active and supporting at FOSS4G. I wonder what has changed?

jonas21 4y ago
VC funding? I think they were funded mostly by grants and their own revenues for the first few years. Then they started taking VC money (over $300M to date).
- dataviz1000 4y ago
  They were once Development Seed [0], a company that specialized in making geo spatial visualizations for the UN, NGOs and nonprofits. Development Seed was a large contributor of code and modules to Drupal 6 which they left. In the beginning, their open source mapping and geo spatial visualizations projects were mostly funded by grants from the Knight Foundation which funded news related projects. MapBox came from an in-house tool they developed to create and manage map overlay tiles. (I could be making this all up.) [0] https://developmentseed.org/ https://developmentseed.org/
bpodgursky 4y ago
It's a really hard product to make profitable. The hosting and bandwidth costs are huge, and most of your customers (by raw count and nominal usage) are hobbyists or free products unwilling to pay even a few cents per user.
- lukeqsee 4y ago
  It's hard, but certainly not impossible. Hosting and bandwidth are key inputs to your costs, but they are manageable.
- Tostino 4y ago
  There is distributed hosting tech for this type of thing at this point. Use it. You could even go old-school BitTorrent, it's been around for decades.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
NelsonMinar 4y ago
2017, Mapbox Raises $164M in Series C Financing: https://www.finsmes.com/2017/10/mapbox-raises-164m-in-series-c-financing.html https://www.finsmes.com/2017/10/mapbox-raises-164m-in-series... It's gone poorly since then though. SoftBank SPAC hunts new merger partner as Mapbox deal falters: https://news.sky.com/story/softbank-spac-hunts-new-merger-partner-as-mapbox-deal-falters-12344967 https://news.sky.com/story/softbank-spac-hunts-new-merger-pa...