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Comment by jusben1369 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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