I've been using Google maps for a decade, and when they started offering a $200 credit, it was fine until my bill started going up to $200-300 after the credits.
It's for a hobby project that's outlasted well-funded projects, so the traffic kept increasing as competitors folded.
A few years back, I tried to run my own tileserver, but the difficulty of creating an updated vector tileset put me off, and I just continued paying the Google tax.
Last month I finally got a really nasty bill, and it forced me to cancel my weekend plans and change to Mapbox.
I like Mapbox for its other API features, but I'm wondering if I could alternate between this and Mapbox, so I keep my overall costs lower. I'd prefer to donate a fixed amount instead.
Question: Does anyone have experience with switching the underlying OSM mapping services either programmatically or by webpage? I'm more asking around the end-user experience. I suppose I have to check what features of mapbox-gl 2+ I use that won't be available in the libre forks.
Im just someone interested in geospatial. Im a regular SWE. Seems like <1% of SWE jobs have even a nominal geospatial element like putting pins on a map.
Any tips in general? Not just for breaking in but what you wish you knew
That's an extremely general question. But mostly my take is: geospatial is not that hard. There are a lot of dinosaurs out there and legacy GIS companies who want you to believe that GIS is special and requires all kinds of specialist knowledge. But for most applications, you can just treat it as, data that happens to also have latitudes and longitudes. And then, it really is just points, lines and polygons the vast majority of the time.
Once you have specific goals about what you're trying to do with data, and how to visualise it etc, then there are usually straightforward solutions to achieving them. The difficulty can sometimes be describing them, or forming the right conceptual model.
It's worth getting really familiar with the GeoJSON spec, and using that as your data structure wherever possible.
Thanks, I mainly want to be able to load either mapbox-gl or its alternatives, then not change the rest of my code. I don't yet know how incompatible mapbox-gl 3 is with the libre options.
It's for a hobby project that's outlasted well-funded projects, so the traffic kept increasing as competitors folded.
A few years back, I tried to run my own tileserver, but the difficulty of creating an updated vector tileset put me off, and I just continued paying the Google tax. Last month I finally got a really nasty bill, and it forced me to cancel my weekend plans and change to Mapbox.
I like Mapbox for its other API features, but I'm wondering if I could alternate between this and Mapbox, so I keep my overall costs lower. I'd prefer to donate a fixed amount instead.
Question: Does anyone have experience with switching the underlying OSM mapping services either programmatically or by webpage? I'm more asking around the end-user experience. I suppose I have to check what features of mapbox-gl 2+ I use that won't be available in the libre forks.