Protomaps Tile Hosting

This is another in a series of articles about map tile hosting. Pinball Map has now been around for like 16 years, and so has tried a few things. I think the overall rundown is: Google Maps, Mapbox, Maplibre using self-hosted mbtiles from OpenMapTiles, then back to Mapbox, and now self-hosted pmtiles from Protomaps. This post is about our experience switching from Mapbox to Protomaps. It covers the overall steps for self-hosting on Cloudflare, and our first month’s bill (it was very small). Background We like the Mapbox tiles and service. We do not like Mapbox’s usage-based dynamic pricing. We cannot afford to spend a lot on map tiles, and it is very risky to use a service where costs can escalate very quickly. For the web map SDK, Mapbox provides 50,000 free map loads per month (one load is counted, roughly, as one user initializing the map a day). An additional 10,000 loads will rocket your bill to $50. It’s notable to me that for Mapbox, it’s not free for them to operate their service for our first 50k loads, yet they don’t charge us anything; and also, the massive increase in price for the 50,001 load does not reflect a sudden increase in their costs when that threshold is exceeded. Their prices are based on some marketing calculation. Mapbox has been very kind enough to offer us a discount (we are open source, not for profit). We used to always skate around 48-50k loads per month. Then at the beginning of this year we were on Hacker News. This resulted in a surge in loads and would have been a large bill, except that we asked for and were granted the discount mentioned above (granted for a limited time). Since then every month is like 56-60k loads. With the discount, we pay a modest $20 or so a month. As an example of the risk that getting attention brings, Hoodmaps once went viral and were hit with an $11k bill from Mapbox.