That's not what they were talking about

This is just outsourcing the payment to donations...that may or may not arrive ("We aim to cover the running costs of our public instance through donations.").

Thank you for sharing this; however, given a significant piece of the author's journey was hiring a cartographer to create custom map designs for his use case, I suspect that this might not be directly suitable for him, any more than Apple Maps was.

This would presumably transfer the need to host map data back to the author, which would represent an ongoing cost, and therefore maybe justify a modest subscription?