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Comment by ryantgtg | Hacker News Reader

Neat!

We used to host our own mbtiles map for like $11/mo, but the problem was (this was prior to planetiler and people generating public worldwide mbtile dumps) there wasn't a free/cheap source for regularly-updated mbtiles. The dump from OpenMapTiles was not updated for years.

So we gave up and went to mapbox, where we regularly exceed the monthly free tier for web, but they give us a discount. Because that is a scary scenario and we are dying to pay a fixed monthly fee, I think we will try yours and donate!

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If your application allows for it, I also recommend checking out Protomaps / PMTiles. Brandon has some insanely cool work making a tile format and related infrastructure that scales nicely.

I wanted to, but I was unable to get Protomaps working in our application, unfortunately. I'm not much of a js person (or a dev) and it was a bigger change than I could apparently handle in our rails app. Actually, thinking back on it, I think the main issue - or at least the one immediately presenting itself - was a CORS problem (a friend was hosting the PMTiles in their DO Spaces). And then I ran out of patience.

Yeah there are some pretty specific requirements for the server hosting the PMtiles that weren't well documented when I last looked at it.

Thanks for giving it a try! If you're going to revisit this, we could improve the docs around setting CORS configuration on DigitalOcean: https://docs.protomaps.com/pmtiles/cloud-storage#digitalocea...

Thank you for sharing the story! I hope OpenFreeMap can contribute either with the MBTiles / Btrfs dumps, or with the public instance.

Thanks for offering the service! The intensity of map tile pricing is always a little baffling to me. For example, with mapbox this month we (got linked to on The Verge and) exceeded the free tier on the 22nd. Two days later and we have a $40 bill and counting, with a week left in the month. We're a free, open source project and can't handle dynamic pricing like this.

My only feedback on your tiles is the lack of POIs. Mostly just bus stops and an occasional supermarket in my area. But I see from the github that this is on the roadmap.

Thanks a lot! Yes, I believe this dynamic pricing is making it impossible for small or non-profit projects to host maps. And you can see, "fun" maps basically disappeared from the internet - they were really common 10 years ago!

For POIs, they are present in the data, it's just that the styles might not have the matching icons for them. But you can always make them into a circle, etc.

Having said that, working on the styles is a big and never ending effort, so if someone would like to help with matching the POIs then contributors welcome.

Look into Planetiler [1]. It's a resource-efficient and easy to setup project to generate mbtiles or pmtiles from OSM pbf files, which are free to download from Geofabrik. It uses the openmaptiles spec for the result files and you can also generate some custom tiles by writing yaml (or forking the java source).

Protomaps also provides daily updated full-planet pmtiles [2], from which you can create a pmtiles extract using its CLI.

[1] https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler [2] https://docs.protomaps.com/basemaps/downloads

To be clear, OpenMapTiles is kept up-to-date. The latest version was published in April: https://www.maptiler.com/news/2024/04/openstreetmap-data-pre...

I think he was referring to a freely available full planet OSM mbtiles dump, to be used with OpenMapTiles. I cannot find a reference to that in your blog post.

Ha, yes, obviously I was referring to the free mbtiles download. Maptiler is currently showing "2020 OpenStreetMap Vectors only"

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