After 9 years of running my own OpenStreetMap tile server infra for MapHub (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11389989), I’ve open-sourced it and launched OpenFreeMap — offering free, unlimited map tile hosting.
OpenFreeMap provides free map hosting for websites and apps with no limits, no registration, no API keys, and no cookies. It’s also fully open-source: see the code at https://github.com/hyperknot/openfreemap and the styles at https://github.com/hyperknot/openfreemap-styles.
Why?
Using OpenStreetMap data usually requires paying for hosting or dealing with complex self-hosting. I wanted to make it easy and accessible for everyone.
How does it work?
Tiles are served directly from Btrfs partition images containing 300 million hard-linked files, avoiding the overhead of a tile server and leveraging Linux kernel file caching.
Key components:
- Tile Generation: Planetiler (https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler)
- Hosting: Nginx serving tiles from Btrfs images on dedicated Hetzner servers.
- No Cloud Services: Optimized file serving on dedicated hardware.
How is it free and unlimited?
With enough donations and subscriptions, I hope to cover bandwidth costs.
Looking forward to your feedback!