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alexandernst

I always wondered who actually pays for the bills in OSM? Who pays all the servers, all the traffic, etc...?

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The Openstreetmap Foundation[1]. They publish financial info too [2].

1. https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Main_Page

2. https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Finances

Donations and a little assistance in kind (discounted/donated hosting). But OSM is incredibly efficiently run. Turnover in 2017 was just £185,395 and that includes the State of the Map conference. The foundation has just one part-time employee for administrative support. Compare to Wikimedia which has turnover of around $80m and 280 employees.

With OSM you have to host the map tiles yourself if you add maps to your website, because OSM servers only provide limited traffic hosting via the API.

Anyone providing service on top of OpenStreetMap can or ideally should host/render stuff on own mirror server. However for small uses I recommend utilising simple reverse proxy caching e.g. with nginx. Here is snippet of nginx config from my geo side-project: https://pastebin.com/brTQ68nw

I use Carto's free tiles, which are great. I only found them when I did a project where the client had a Carto licence. I've used the free tiles (with Leaflet) for every map project I've done since.

There are OSM tileservers.. that's what you see when you go to https://www.openstreetmap.org. You are encouraged to host your own tiles if needed.

https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Finances

https://hardware.openstreetmap.org/thanks/

The main OSM org doesn't actually host any of the servers that end users use. They host a website for editors to contribute and publish data dumps. Devs providing access to OSM download the data dumps and host it on their own servers.

The OSM website includes tile servers which render the tiles that are on https://www.openstreetmap.org

They do but thats not meant to be used on your app/website. It's mainly for editors to use.

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