It depends on your hobby project. Google's free tier gives unlimited map views, commercial or not. (Edit: On native apps.)

Mapbox's free tier only gives 50k map views, and only for non-commercial apps. If you're a paid app, you also have to pay $499 per month on top of your usage.

Mapbox also gives unlimited map views for native mobile apps. Pricing is instead based on monthly active users (50k free).

Not if your app is paid though, and then the $499 only covers you to 250 seats (!).

I like what they're doing, and wanted to use them for a web app with restricted access, but certainly not going to pay $499pcm for a side project.

Happy to chat custom pricing, I work at Mapbox with many of the solo / independent developers. I'm @EqMapbox on twitter.

That's probably a good business strategy for the future of Maps. The fewer clients you have, the more focused you can be in terms of product development and pricing. This is true in many businesses, actually.

It's risky to leave customers out that will feed your competition.

Every business decision carries risk. The question is whether or not the risk is acceptable.

If you don't want to serve any customers making under $10M, then other companies serving those customers are not your competition. At least not today. Is there a risk they might take their broader customer base and use it to compete with you upmarket some day? Yes. But that's why you do things like build a brand, relationships, technologies, and other competitive advantages within your niche.

Fancy steakhouses generally don't worry about McDonald's. (Not that this is a perfect analogy to Google vs MapBox. Just speaking generally here in response to your general point.)

Sounds more like Google is turning it into an actual business. I assumed that MapBox was making some money, given that it relies on OSM and can cut corners, but it isn't.

> Not so surprising after Google's recent pricing changes.

Didn't that happen just a week or so ago? I don't think this can be attributed to the pricing change this early.

Maybe they are. There's a huge difference in approach between the two. With enterprise customers, customer support will be very different for example.