I'm sure they're well aware. The SaaS community decided that it's better to use it as a carrot to sign up for the app. Even repl.it doesn't let you play around without signing up anymore. https://replit.com/talk/ask/Is-it-now-required-sign-up-to-cr... And they could use that as an excuse to do cool stuff with WebAssembly.

I think they may have reversed this decision. I just went to replit.com, scrolled to the bottom, clicked c++ and arrived at https://replit.com/languages/cpp After that I could just hit Run and it worked. The "Sign up for the full experience" button shook a bit to draw attention to itself, but otherwise no sign up was required to use it.

I didn't try clicking there! It used to be easier to find.

To be honest, they're probably right. Anyone doing mapping for professional reasons is going to spend more effort testing this out because of the potential upside.

Nobody just clicking around is likely to buy a sub just for kicks.

If they're not going to buy a sub either way, what's the downside of letting them test it, and then perhaps telling their friends about it?

If you are using a provider like Mapbox to render the tiles you are going to pay by requests / tiles / resources used so having low-intent drive-by traffic is not going to help you.

Especially at the beginning when you are still refining your product / figure out a business model. Maybe further down the line they have a freemium version but it's probably not what you should start with if you are aiming for paying customers giving feedback.

Server cost. Fraud. Indistinguishable user sessions.