Free Maps for All

All my recent personal map projects (Backdrop, World Level Zero, Guess This City) are available for free online. However, because I make zero money from my maps, I cannot afford to host them myself or pay a provider for the map tiles that they use. This means I have to be a little creative in publishing my maps online.

Thanks to the amazing Glitch and the generosity of TripGeo I am able to host my maps online cost free. 

Map tiles, however, are a little more difficult. I cannot afford to pay Google, Mapbox, Esri or any of the other map tile providers for map tiles. That is why I often find myself browsing the Leaflet Provider Demo map. This map is a fantastic source for map tile layers which are not password or key protected.

However, just because these map tiles are not password or key protected does not strictly mean that you are free to use these map tiles in your own maps without paying for the privilege. If you use these map tiles in your maps without paying, then the providers will incur the hosting costs. That means I try not to rely too heavily on these unprotected map tile services just because they are unprotected. The same goes for hot-linking to the OpenStreetMap map tiles and passing on your map tile costs to OSM.

I am, therefore, delighted to report that there is now a new free map provider on the market. OpenFreeMap provides ...

"free map hosting so you can display custom maps on your website and apps.

It is truly free: there are no limits on the number of map views or requests you can make, nor on how you use your map. There is no registration page, no user database, no API keys, nor cookies."

The OpenFreeMap map tiles are vector tiles, which means that they are perfect for use with the open-source MapLibre map library. In fact, the example given in the Quick Start Guide shows you how to use the tiles with MapLibre. The guide also says that a Leaflet based example is coming soon. If you are already familiar with Leaflet, you might not need the guide. Even though there is yet no Leaflet example, I was quickly able to get the tiles to work in Leaflet by using the Maplibre GL Leaflet library.

The launch of OpenFreeMap is exciting news for online map developers. It is a fantastic resource for 'hobby' projects like mine which can now be developed and shared without having to worry about map tile costs or map tile limitations.