|
Hi all, I am the lead developer of an open source project called FSEconomy that provides a free service to flight sim enthusiasts. We have been serving the community for over 15 years now. As you would think, maps play an important part of flying, and over the years we have had various solutions, finally ending up with Google Maps, which for quite some time satisfied those needs. Of course that changed from the free limit per day, which we never hit to a reduction of over half that daily limit for the whole month. We are removing that dependency and started looking at using leafletjs and OSM for the mapping requirements. The only funds we collect are strictly volunteer donations that are opened now and then (collecting a limited amount) to cover the basic server costs and registration fees. Would anyone have any recommendations for a tile service that would perhaps provide free access for open source project with appropriate acknowledgements on the site, or for a reasonable fixed cost for a project like this? Currently costs are computed to be so high we could get a completely new server to self-host for the monthly costs (not counting labor) that would be charged. |
|
The problem is that providing the resources and running the service isn't free for anybody and given that no income is derived from providing such a free service, it will always be dicey to -rely- on a third party providing it for free. It is quite possible to run a global tile service using OSM data on a $100-$150 per month server (say from Hetzner), you still need to get donations to cover such a cost, but you get a lot more freedom from where to get them. If you can live with pre-generated vector tiles, such a machine could be substantially smaller btw. In any case here's a list of commercial providers https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Commercial_OSM_Software_and_Services |
Self-hosting is definitely an option - see https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/ for more information. How big a server you would need depends very much on how detailed you want the maps to be that you are serving.