OSM Operations

Yes and No.

No because the official OSM tile layer is heavily subsidized by Fastly (€720k last I checked) and rendering by AWS (€40k)

Yes because technically it would use fewer resources thus easier on AWS+Fastly and also easier to self-host

In last risk assessment I read closely(1) OSM noted "If we lost [Fastly] sponsorship, we would likely cut off all third-party access to the standard tile layer and run a small number of Varnish servers."

As I understand it, primary drivers for vectors was not cost more improving internationalization, generally enabling client-side rendering decisions, and driving a modern toolchain that would net multiple follow-on benefits

I'm a bit behind, there is more recent info available at (2)

1.https://operations.osmfoundation.org/2024/01/25/owg_budget.ods 2. https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Finances

It's not free as in you are not allowed to use OSM tiling servers for commercial purposes. "OpenStreetMap’s own servers are run entirely on donated resources. They have strictly limited capacity. [...] OpenStreetMap data is free for everyone to use. Our tile servers are not." [1]. They've even banned some sites for abusing their servers, e.g., FastPokeMap in 2016 [2]. But there is a very clear way of switching to OSM and serving your own map tiles with any styling you want [3]. I personally think that startups like these should go for these options since their user base is concentrated in one region.

[1] https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/
[2] https://github.com/openstreetmap/chef/pull/78
[3] https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/

Wikipedia? They have plenty funds to sustain their infra and core team to maintain it.

What about all the (big) freeloaders who use OpenStreetMap Foundation's map tile server infrastructure [1] instead of self-hosting as it was intended [2](or using a SaaS)?

All the corporate sponsors who fund OSMF [3] roll their own map stack, but outside of them still there occasionally appears a rogue app/website with high traffic. IIRC, most of the tile server traffic comes from outside of osm.org.

[1] https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/

[2] https://switch2osm.org/

[3] Who still are controversial for their constant "bargaining" on how to put the copyright notice in the least visible way, even though it's required by ODbL license.

OpenStreetMap tile servers aren't really meant to be used for this. They do allow some use, but are also subject to throttling if your application puts too much load on their servers.

> However, OpenStreetMap’s own servers are run entirely on donated resources. They have strictly limited capacity. Heavy use of OSM tiles adversely affects people’s ability to edit the map, and is an abuse of the individual donations and sponsorship which provide hardware and bandwidth. As a result, we require that users of the tiles abide by this tile usage policy.

https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/

OSM is a dataset. That's free and open.
There are different tile servers (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_servers) but they each have a different policy (https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/)

In a nutshell: you can't just use them in production for your app. Development shouldn't be a problem.

What you're talking about is precisely the commercial service that Mapbox offers. OSM (+ some extra stuff).

Alternatively, you're free to spin up your own tile server. That way you don't pay anyone else (but you pay your server).

From what I can find, CARTO does not have a free map tile server. In other words, while it technically works, I think it's against their terms of service. They probably don't care if you're small, so I wouldn't worry about legal threats, but at some point the tile server might check the referer and break your app.

It looks like you can just use OpenStreetMap instead, although the resources are donated so there is no guaranteed Service Level Agreement: https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/