Google Maps Open-Source Challenger MapBox Raises $10M From Foundry Group | Hacker News Reader

Google Maps Open-Source Challenger MapBox Raises $10M From Foundry Group

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98 pointspaulkroka44 comments

Stupid title. Even MapBox might agree they don't compete with Google Maps. They are here to make OSM awesome, and hats off to MapBox for what they've done so far.

They do compete with Google Map tiles. And so far that seems to be their biggest factor of financial income, at least looking from the outside.

They most certainly do. I got a quote from Google for commercial maps use a few weeks ago. 17.5k/yr an up. Mapbox seems like a good alternative for serious web mapping. Google Maps is still pretty week in B2B type mapping though. Esri is the real competitor here.

Only 17.5k/yr? You got off easy! Our first quote at $work was 6 figures, though we ended up settling on a figure more than yours and less than $100k/yr. We've now switched to OSM + MapQuest open tiles + leaflet and couldn't be happier with the result.

Their TileMill software is great. You don't have to sign up to have them serve your maps, you can use all of their tools to generate your tilesets and do what you like with them (obviously attributing your data set source). The MapBox iOS SDK is another stand out contribution from these guys.

Some of their free offerings are so great that i sometimes worry they might be (maybe unintended) in a "embrace, extend" phase, extinguishing competitors left and right. Their uprise is insane.

I love MapBox -- I am a happy paying customer -- but the title seems a little misleading: what is open source about them? They source their data from OpenStreetMap, which is open-source, but MapBox themselves is not. Or am I missing something?

They open source a lot of their software. Check out tilemill:

https://www.mapbox.com/tilemill/

That's really awesome. But I still don't think describing MapBox themselves as "Open-Source" is accurate. There are LOTS Of other companies that open source a lot of their code, but certainly wouldn't be considered "Open-Source" themselves: Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, id, Novell, Oracle. The list goes on.

I certainly don't want to take anything away from MapBox. I really love what they offer. I just don't think it's fair to describe them as "Open-Source".

MapBox does not sell any software or hardware -- all the tools are open source. Unlike Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, id, Novell, Oracle. The list goes on.

Sure they do. They are a SaaS provider. At least I presume that's what they're charging my credit card for every month.

Right, but the software used to do it, and the tools to integrate, are open source, which is the original question above. You can do everything MapBox is doing yourself, on your own, but good luck scaling and making it georedundant at super high volume -- that's MapBox's value add.

I did not realize that. This is exactly what I was asking for clarification on when I first posted. Not sure why we had to get 6 levels deep into the discussion to get to the point, but here we are. Thank you.

https://github.com/mapbox/

"156 public repos"

https://github.com/twitter/ "100 public repos"

https://github.com/facebook "95 public repos"

https://github.com/37signals "44 public repos"

https://github.com/linkedin "49 public repos"

https://github.com/soundcloud "131 public repos"

These aren't "Open-Source companies". They contribute greatly to open source projects. But aren't themselves "Open-Source".

You can use MapBox's open source software to do everything you'd pay MapBox for on your own. You'll just have your work cut out to autoscale and make it georedundant at high volume, which is MapBox's value add. MapBox isn't selling the software IP, the user, ads, or lock-in.

Simply posting a github link and "156 public repos" doesn't really imply this, though. So thank you for clarifying.

If 37signals were to release basecamp, this would be a better comparison. At that point, I would probably call 37signals an opensource company, even if they ran a SASS model.

They have a lot of open source code:

https://github.com/mapbox/

and it is possible to run the exact setup they charge you for on your own servers using that code. They're basically as open source as a SaaS company could be.

as others have pointed out, their map authoring tool, TileMill is open source, as well as many other projects (iD for editing OSM, mapnik is heavily authored by MapBox engineers, etc). But it goes quite a bit beyond even that. Their tile hosting software is mostly open source as well, which they call TileStream. Without too much trouble you can actually recreate the bulk of their SaaS hosting offering using their open source code base. So their SaaS offering is pretty close to fully open source. They're starting to move into premium data (ie satellite data after a natural disaster), so obviously that stuff isn't going to be open, but it is pretty impressive how much of their entire stack they develop on github.

I wonder how much this is simply about startups not wanting to rely on Google. Even Apple felt uncomfortable relying on their maps product. So much smaller startups probably hate that dependency too.

It's more about startups wanting to rely on open data and open source vs proprietary.

Open is better than proprietary for sure. However a BOD won't care too much about that. They will care about being dependent upon a current or future competitor for critical functionality though.

Problem is Google map isn't much customisable, and when you do lot of dev involving maps then only affordable solution is Mapbox.

I am sure it is partly due to the fact that this is way cheaper than google maps or esri for heavy commercial use.

Out of curiosity, how much does the Google Maps API actually cost for a business license?

17.5k/yr for the lowest package was what I was quoted a couple weeks ago. It was actually not a terrible deal compared to most of the alternatives as far as value goes... but the starter package is way larger than you would need for most things. They essentially price segment the small startups out of the market. OTOH, many of the other GIS server licenses push 100k+, so that is why something like mapbox is getting people excited.

I'm doing a Foursquare/Yelp clone/mashup for my country with two friends, and we're using OSM + Mapbox because we figured it will be much cheaper than Google (and it's very easy and developer-friendly too).

We're still using the free version so we could have gone with Google, but we wanted to plan ahead.

If your app uses maps, it's time to get on board the MapBox rocket. Resistance is futile.

The mapbox team is fantastic, this is totally great news for all of them, the mapping community, and map users. Can't wait to see what they come up with next

That's going to seriously shake the mapping space. MapBox is quite an unstoppable force now.

I saw their CEO speak at an event in Geneva last month - went in having not heard of MapBox, came out impressed. It's a really cool model - particularly the way that corrections made to a map by a FourSquare user, for example would be instantly reflected to a user on Uber.

What happened to OpenStreetMap?

Nothing. Mapbox are quite large supporters of OSM; they wrote the iD editor for it.

http://ideditor.com/

Mapbox also pays Artem Pavlenko, the lead developer of Mapnik [1], which has for a while been the main tile renderer used by OSM. Their interests there align nicely, because Mapnik is also the rendering backend for Mapbox's TileMill software.

[1] http://mapnik.org/

Also Dennis Luxen, developer of OSRM.

MapBox is to OpenStreetMap as Ubuntu is to Linux.

MapBox provide hosted tiles, beautiful designed custom tiles and a bunch of nice tools (including iD, the in-browser editor). OpenStreetMap provide the community-maintained dataset. MapBox have been very supportive of the OSM community in terms of donations, sponsorship of events, use of office space and so on.

The point is if you are Foursquare and you want to start using OpenStreetMap, MapBox will give you commercial support and design services and so on. OpenStreetMap (the community, the non-profit Foundation etc.) won't.

As someone who sits in #osm and #osm-dev on irc.oftc.net and helps at least one person a day, I'd like to point out that the community will most definitely give you support. MapBox certainly makes it easier to pay someone, but the community isn't completely shut off from the world :).

Oh, sure. We're a pretty friendly and helpful community, but I think the analogy holds. ;)

Mapbox is awesome. Speaking of their tile maps, there are two things that make them less competitive compared to Google: geocoding and street view. While nominatim is fantastic, it is nearly not as good as google maps search, which has people employed full time to update company listings, etc. There are many companies that depend on search so much they are willing to stick to google maps.

I just hope they dont fall down as a option when Google come up with a buy offer..

For users, developers and the society in general, competition and options are a good thing..

I cant say i didnt feel sad when Waze was bought.. with more time and effort no product would bare to stand against it

MapBox is a ridiculous joke until they start supporting building numbers.

(Yes, they know of this limitation, but they deliberately cripple their product because of 'typographical clarity' or somesuch bullshit.)

The product isn't a joke just because it doesn't support the one minor feature you want. I use it and love it.

Do you mean adding building numbers to the map (similar to the OSM Mapnik tiles?) This is something you can do yourself in TileMill and then overlay onto MapBox Streets or other tiles.

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