It's not as impressive as you make it sound. The real value of the Maps API is in 1) routing and 2) local business details. These are both hard for anybody else to provide, so Google prices them accordingly. The price for the tiles is just an extension to the overall pricing.
The current offerings of google, mapbox, bing, etc are prohibitively expensive when you just need a small subset of their features.
The company I work for is a happy customer of maptiler.com which even offers routing and reverse geocoding. It might not be as great and up to date as google's, but it's more than enough for our apps.
As I've said, the solutions are there, and there is an actual demand for cheap vector tile hosting without all of the other cruft that is bundled in the commercial solutions but isn't actually needed.
Fortunately there’s a large selection of background layers for leaflet: http://leaflet-extras.github.io/leaflet-providers/preview/ I quite like CartoDB Positron for as a muted background.
> However, OpenStreetMap’s own servers are run entirely on donated resources. They have strictly limited capacity. Heavy use of OSM tiles adversely affects people’s ability to edit the map, and is an abuse of the individual donations and sponsorship which provide hardware and bandwidth. As a result, we require that users of the tiles abide by this tile usage policy.
The default OSM tile server is not here to serve your startup.
> All Maps Embed API requests are available at no charge with unlimited usage.
That situation is actually kind of outrageous. Municipalities and governmental bodies feed data into Google rather than publicly-accessible platforms (like OSM). And so do the private businesses, with no regulatory mechanism forcing either them to submit the same data to local / public databases (like yellow pages, national map site / registries, or OSM) or forcing Google to provide dumps of its data for the public to use.
I hate having to access Google to find information which is simply not available in map for, or at all, elsewhere.
I'm not necessarily saying municipalities should build this stuff out themselves, only that it freaks me out when small governments rely on giant corporations to support their infrastructure.
I used to provide data to Google, mark missing postboxes, etc. Then I realised I am just helping them make money.
Also they used to be quick, and got sloppy - 7 years ago my submission would get processed in 1 week. Recently i submitted nearby postbox, with GPS coordinates and pictures - 6 months, no responce.
This is lile with social networks - the content is what matters, and people give it away for free
(Mobile app where you can fix and enhance OpenStreetMap data on the go.)
Not sure if there are ready use alternatives, but at least in theory with OSM you could fully control what is being shown. And what not.
Google Maps isn’t charging for raw bandwidth/storage. They spend massive amounts on R&D to make Maps the most useful and competitive global mapping solution. This comes at a cost, which is completely different than using community-maintained partially-complete OSM maps.
Google is crowdsourcing both