Show HN: An alternative to the Google Elevation API using open data

GPXZ (https://www.gpxz.io) is an API for elevation point queries. These APIs are used for things like flight planning, flood analysis, elevation profile visualisation, and weather forecast localisation.

Google Maps is the name brand elevation API but it's expensive, you are restricted in how you use the data, they decrease accuracy for batch queries, and their dataset is being left behind by all the amazing open data sources released in the last few years.

You can self-host an API serving open data (I also develop https://github.com/ajnisbet/opentopodata) which helps you do this) but elevation data comes in different formats and quality levels which are non-trivial to merge without artefacts, and the datasets are too large for a typical cloud workflow.

So I built the 12 TB GPXZ dataset, which carefully merges open lidar and satellite sources covering the whole globe. The idea is that with a single dataset you can get the best-possible data in your area of interest.

The gpxz.io API runs on a boring stack: nginx, uwsgi and python on dedicated servers. Everything is in a django monolith, except the API which I recently liberated from the monolith into a standalone flask service. I have a few freelance customers who are paying me for data processing and managed opentopodata hosting that have been extremely helpful in validating this idea.

I know this is a niche service compared to most Show HNs, happy to answer any questions about elevation data or geospatial APIs!