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Comment by robertlagrant | Hacker News Reader

> The Google Maps API has a generous free tier, but high fees past 30,000 map loads. Protomaps is designed from the ground up to be a system you run yourself - as a 100% static backend on cloud storage - so you only incur the usage costs of storing and serving that data, which can be pennies for moderate usage.

It would be interesting to see a cost comparison: recommended hosting setup vs Google Maps, and at what point the line intersects.

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I haven't found this info in the FAQ, but it would be interesting to know how large that PMTiles file is for a medium-sized country.

It seems to be a really attractive way of self-hosting maps that don't have to be 100% up to date and are only used in a specific region. "Recompiling" that file once a year and uploading it to a static file hoster would be an easy process with very little external dependencies.

Edit: Found the official download link[1] for the whole world, which is a bit over 100 GB. So I guess the answer to my question would be "hundreds of MB to a few GB", which seems totally fine.

[1] https://docs.protomaps.com/basemaps/downloads

Geofabrik already does this for vector tiles of each country, but as individual mvt files rather than in a container like pmtiles or mbtiles.

http://download.geofabrik.de/

That's true - I suppose the cost changes depending on the size of the area you're mapping. Maybe a representative set? A city (e.g. Johannesburg), a small country (e.g. UK), and a large country (e.g. USA)?

Monaco is 500k, Ireland +NI is 400M, and Europe is 40G, for their basemap output.

(Representative numbers from my runs)

Cloudflare: 100GB hosting is $1 and $.36 for 10 million requests.

If you read the Protomaps docs it explains how to cache the requests on Cloudflare CDN so you only have to pay for each tile request once per cache period. It's quite cheap.

Edit: previous submission title for Protomaps: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API

Okay but the question was what it actually costs, not what our favorite mitm provider offers as a commercial service (they have the worldwide hardware and sufficiently deep pockets to offer this at a rate that guarantees gaining market share, below the cost price of normal hosting providers)

Are you asking how much it would cost to run this on self-hosted bare metal servers? Otherwise I'm also not sure what you're asking for.

I mean, one of the examples uses cloudflare to host the thing, so that is the pricing parent is talking about. What else do you want?

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