And how much do the database server(s) cost, not to mention pushing map tiles out in terms of data costs. DDG isn't exactly flush with cash like google and apple are.

More or less as paying some service provider to do that for you, but they could have marketed it positively, as Qwant has done just last month (see https://www.qwant.com/maps/ which incidentally is open source as well)

If you're looking for privacy protection, Qwant's partnership with Huawei doesn't sound great https://e.huawei.com/us/publications/global/ict_insights/hw_...

Not much at all. In fact, since the tiles are only generated once, they could stick a CDN in front and never have to worry about anything but data transfer costs afterwards.

That CDN isn't free all the content and traffic overhead has costs, CDN charges you for each request, and every byte sent. On a small (under a million users a day) application it may not be that much... but even ten of millions of users a day, it costs a LOT

Hell, why do you think google invested so much time into image compression tech to save a few bytes here and there.

I doubt it’s much, the whole OSM infrastructure used to be handled as a favour by one of the London universities. I doubt DDG Maps is operating at significantly higher scale, especially once you take into account they just have to serve static data.

OSM data is constantly changing, being improved and expanded.

Do you think Apple sells their maps below cost, or that Apple is able (due to its scale?) to get significantly better deals than DDG could get?