Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

Something I'd be willing to pay for is historical tiles/data.

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!

I really like the idea.

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?

Related : I'm building https://github.com/laem/cartes, an alternative to Google Maps.

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.

Neat!

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!

This is really cool, I'll definitely look at this if I need to embed a map in the future. Are there any libraries that lets you plot geographic data on top of this in Python, with Matplotlib or similar?

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?

https://overturemaps.org/about/faq/

I understand you don't plan to make money, only to cover costs. Nevertheless, I believe you would benefit from a more explicit "business plan". Your Gold support plan kind of fulfills that purpose (email support and an invoice), but right now it's kind of hidden in the middle of a donation request, and flavored as a donation. You might convince a lot more mba-type people to support you if you also extend the same offer under a heading like "business plan" (where you make it clear that commercial use is free, but you can subscribe to this totally-not-a-donation plan for email support)

I absolutely love this project and had a similar idea on my todo list for a while because I agree there should be at least one free open map provider with a developer friendly stack.

If you want free servers/bandwidth around the world, hit me up. My email is in my profile.

This is neat! After the huge price increase a couple years ago with GMaps, it looks like you’ve come up with a creative way to offer much of the same functionality for most users. It’s unfortunate to still see small business sites to this day with error messages on their map widgets because of the API change from Google.

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.

FYI if you need a CDN you can get bulk pricing from fastly with a monthly commitment.

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.

I think this is great, and also that you are getting some good advice in the comments about covering costs and/or monitization. I'd add my thoughts, but others have already expressed them here so I just wanted to say I love seeing this kind of philosophy expressed in a project like this.

edit to fix typo

If it does a good job, somebody should get paid for it. I wouldn't rely on using this if it depends on donations (I call this begware). People expect to pay for services and products.

Alternative: https://versatiles.org/

I currently use the cyclosm[1] as a tile map for my small web app. I'd love to use OpenFreeMap instead, as cyclosm is quite slow. Is there any way I can do this for bicycle maps? Awesome project.

[1] https://www.cyclosm.org

Would be interested in seeing a cost bar vs donations bar on the website.

Hello. This seems like exactly something I'm looking for to save cost for my project: https://golfcourse.wiki

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.

Just want to say thank you for making this project. I think there's a good chance I will use it for a (very low bandwidth) personal project.

This looks really interesting. It might be a viable replacement for the back-end of an app I am working on that provides navigation for visually impaired people through spacialized sound. https://github.com/soundscape-community/soundscape

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've been using Google maps for a decade, and when they started offering a $200 credit, it was fine until my bill started going up to $200-300 after the credits.

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.

Always on the lookout for self-hosted map servers, so I'll definitely try this one out.

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.

[0]: https://www.maptiler.com/

This is amazing!

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)

Very curious to know more about this, regarding PMTiles:

> 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.

How can I use this to plot database metadata such as users, vendors, suppliers at their respective addresses. I’m developing a simple Django application and this would be a great addition.

I've been waiting for a good alternative to the paid map providers for a while but none of them have really hit near the level of feature parity I needed to be a good enough replacement.

I created a similar project, https://serverlessmaps.com which lets you host PMTiles on S3 and CloudFront, with a Lambda@Edge layer where you could also do auth...

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)...

Looks great love the free tiles and no limits or API keys.

Question, why use btrfs?

As a Roman, the decision on how to prioritize the labels seems very interesting to me!

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.

https://i.postimg.cc/sggZ2pHh/image.png

Right on time! Thank you and congratulations for your release. I was looking for gmaps and mapbox alternatives this morning and right now I'm considering this.

I'm relatively new to mapping, can you explain the difference between running Leaflet and a free map tiling provider compared to your product?

I miss some libre client for Google's Street View. On 3D maps, adapting Marble for OSGEarth should be a piece of cake.

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.

Thanks for this free service Zsolt. I hope it's not abused (too much traffic) and that donations from real users fund this very good initiative ;-)

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.

Thank you so much for sharing the setup and the hosted service.

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?

Hey, just curious. If you have no Cloud/LB/CDN how are you routing requests to datacenters? Anycast? DNS? Something else?

Very nice!

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?

Seems like a great service! We could definitely consider this as an viable option for our startup's application. I am not an expert regarding the OSM data and maps in general, but how customizable is your library, can I somehow relatively easy add housenumbers of the addresses from OSM data on the buildings in the map?

Very cool, love the various tile sets (especially the 3d layer!)

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.

I know the github says docker free.... What would it take to dockerize so people can self host, say on kubernetes.

About displaying the vector tiles, which project goes well with it? I like Leaflet and worked extensively with it, but it has some compatibility problems with vector tiles and other small issues when dragging vector tiles for example. Is Maplibre the gold standard for vector tiles now?

I am currently exploring the open source mapping world and trying to get a better grasp of what's available.

How does this project compare to Apache Baremaps (incubating)?

https://baremaps.apache.org/

Hard links are to deduplicate identical tiles, right? How much does that save and how close is the tile with most links (empty one(s)?) to the filesystem limits? Inquiring minds want to know...

Seems like the full world download links dont work, 404: https://btrfs.openfreemap.com/

Awesome. I've been waiting forever for a vector OSM replacement. I already changed it to be the default for my open source GPS tracking project.

Awesome! Moreover, I love how hyperknot is engaging with the people and the feedback :) This is super inspiring.

Very good initiative, I will try it out for my project and donate monthly if it is successful!

This is fantastic, thank you!

I would be interested in the differences between this and protomaps

Great project! Do you support geocoding with a nominatim api?

Anybody know of a similar service for weather information?

Very interesting, I might try this at $WORK.

How much disk space do you need to host it?

leafletjs and openstreetmap is also cool