It's all the other stuff that's built on top of that that is a lot harder and more valuable. Maps are a commodity at this point and there's very little money in providing just some basic maps. Customers for these services tend to spend a lot of money on getting all sorts of bespoke solutions. Think of indoor maps, traffic services, routing, geo coding, address search (surprisingly hard problem with open data), etc. The most simple one of which is showing maps. Mapbox is increasingly an alternative to Here, Tom Tom and a few others that offer a wide range of services. So, I know a thing or two about this market and still know some people working with various map companies, including at mapbox. I actually used to work with Nokia and Nokia Maps (in Berlin), which is now Here Maps. But honestly, map tiler is good value for money for now. I might invest some time at some point in self hosting tiles. We switched to that from leaflet and I've been pretty happy with it. We use maplibre and map tiler for the map tiles in the startup that I run. The next challenge is to evolve the tech stack to something beyond what Mapbox worked up five/ten years ago. But, PMTiles aside, this is still Mapbox’s world. It’s great that people are now shipping production vector tiles without paying the Mapbox dollar. It’s now mostly known for a reasonable, not particularly exceptional vector tile schema. OpenMapTiles started life as basically a how-to/makefile pulling together the disparate, poorly documented parts of Mapbox’s open source tile generation code. Maputnik is an open source reimplementation of Mapbox Studio. Maplibre GL (which I use and like very much) is a fork of the last open source version of Mapbox GL, with not many code changes between now and then. PMTiles is genuinely innovative and I’m delighted to see it getting traction. Let’s not pretend that much of this is anything other than “open source clones of Mapbox”. But for most of our use cases, we don’t need the latest and greatest.
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