What if I want to add custom data to the map like say a police crime filter on the top.

Can I still use this? Or do I need felt

Very knew to make sorry

If you have any geospatial data, you can tile it with tippecanoe [0], which gives you an mbtiles file. Protomaps lets you easily convert the mbtiles file into a protomaps file which you can then use.

Protomaps doesn’t limit you to any particular type of tiles, it’s just a format which allows you to read tiles out of a single file with HTTP range requests.

[0] https://github.com/mapbox/tippecanoe

Hi, thanks for the mention!

The Mapbox repo has an older version of tippecanoe; there's a newer version actively being improved by Felt at http://github.com/felt/tippecanoe , and they've also funded my addition of the Protomaps format (PMTiles) as a direct output. No conversion step required anymore!

As the developer of this system, I concur with this; Protomaps is focused on map tiles, and can be used with other solutions such as http://geocode.earth for search.

A small detail: I don't believe this is the absolute cheapest way to deliver map tiles. Renting an unmetered bandwidth server is always going to be the cheapest way to host content, but unmanaged servers don't give you SSL termination, infinite storage, or an edge cache.

Protomaps is designed as the right compromise between self-hosted operational+development costs and SaaS-like delivery.

Thank you for your hard work on this.

For vehicle routing you can add GraphHopper