PMTiles is amazing. We discovered it when we were building a Canadian wildfire hotspot map this summer.

We were taking daily CSV files, turning them into vector tiles, syncing them with S3, and displaying in mapbox-gl map. The biggest cost was S3 file operations. We had to aggressively cluster to reduce our cost down and got to a point where the tiles numbered ~75,000. At the frequency we wanted to update this was costing $500/mo in S3 ops.

Now we process the files into a single PMTiles file, deploy that one file and cut the costs down to pennies.

For a map that we make public, it was incredibly enabling. You can checkout the Canadian hotspot data for all of 2023 if you're curious: https://lens.pathandfocus.com