If you're strapped for cash, there are some lower-priced alternatives in the OSM ecosystem. https://thunderforest.com/ , for example, has map tiles available in vector and raster forms, and https://www.graphhopper.com/ is a full-featured alternative to the Mapbox routing stack. You can always self-host, too, whether for map rendering or routing or whatever.

(Not to detract from Mapbox, whose product line is amazing and who have some of the smartest engineers out there.)

Mapzen is also excellent (although definitely less mature than Mapbox), and a huge chunk of their stack is open source.

At Mapzen, all our code is open source, from front-end UIs to back-end "glue." Have a look at:

- web and mobile SDKs: http://github.com/mapzen/

- map rendering library: http://github.com/tangrams

- map tiles: https://github.com/tilezen/

- routing/navigation: https://github.com/valhalla/

- public transit: https://github.com/transitland/

- search/geocoding: http://github.com/pelias

- gazetteer: https://github.com/whosonfirst

FWIW, we do have a few private repos, to protect some ops internals as well as upcoming blog posts.

(I work at Mapzen -- and am also a happy user of Mapbox's open-source libraries.)

Mapzen is an awesome company. I'm excited to see what comes of OpenTraffic, a Mapzen-sponsored, open-source traffic speed data set: https://github.com/opentraffic/

Yup. I've checked out a bunch of those – and have actually contributed to pelias/api (and a dependency, addressit).

Everything I've seen so far has been clean and pretty easy to follow. Really appreciate the work you all do.

I'm a very happy Mapzen customer.

Mapbox actually just changed their pricing structure to be more friendly to startups and developers - take a look https://blog.mapbox.com/pay-as-you-go-new-flexible-pricing-o...

Vector tiles that you can self-host, cache, download for offline use etc.: https://openmaptiles.org

Can you name a few usecases where you would pay them? Doesn#t have to include your own.

We build a data store for municipal governments, we have a very light weight data viz tool that allows municipal workers to view the data on a map: http://john.je/mzHm

FYI your status page is returning an SSL error. Since you're using HSTS, Chrome is blocking the request altogether.

And why didn't you do it in an open standard data format and just present it on Google Maps?

Google Maps itself isn't exactly open standard... See the woes of OpenLayers, for example.

Yes, that's why I put these as two separate points.

The downvotes let me assume that people understood this question as a suggestion. But it was really just a question from someone who hasn't looked into that space for 10 years and is curious how it looks like from an expert perspective.

The Google Maps API is also more expensive than Mapbox.

We have exportability as a first class citizen, so you can push out to google maps, tableau, esri, carto, etc. Data viz is not our core competency or something we intend to do very much of.

If you don't want to host your own map tile server?