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Comment by tppiotrowski | Hacker News Reader

It seems that tile hosting is a large business. Apple, Mapbox, Mapzen, Google? all offer free tiers for their tiles that cost big $$$$ once you go over the limit.

I have thought about making a generic API for centering a map, adding a marker, etc that would map (pun intended) the instructions onto the respective JS Api (Mapbox.js, MapKit JS, ...) allowing you to rotate between the services on each page load as to not exhaust the free tier as fast.

You'll get a slightly different UI each time, but I think people generally know how to use a slippy map.

Does this exist? Is anyone interested in something like this?

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Leaflet JS is a generic library that works with mapbox and other tileserver apis. So yes you actually could do this trivially right now.

The API to tileservers is trivial, you provide a URL template and request the tile with the x/y/zoom you want and the tileserver responds with either a cached tile or it will render it on demand.

Good point. Leaflet could be another implementation option since Mapbox free tier gives you 50,000 loads of their JS client (unlimited tiles per load) and 750,000 raster tiles. [1]

So you could alternate loading Mapbox JS and loading Leaflet with Mapbox tiles.

[1] https://www.mapbox.com/pricing/

It isn't a big business by many orders of magnitude.

The only businesses that over the years have been able to offer tile hosting as a sustainable business are very small mum and pop shops.

The large players are naturally not interested directly in the money aspect of providing the service, but in synergies with other, actually profitable, parts of their business.

And those in between are always in between pivots.

You'd increase the "free tier" a bit but with the trade-off of much more complex coding. I'm not really sure if I'd be worth it.

The consumer of this "library" would just configure their Mapbox, Mapzen, Apple API keys and do something like:

  map.center(23.12, -156.12)
  map.placeMarker(23.12, -156.12)

This would in turn load and display a location marker using either a Google Map, Apple Map, Mapbox, etc on each subsequent load. The complexity would be in implementing it, but using it would be simple.

Historically this existed a _long_ time ago, as in about 12 years or so. It was called Mapstraction.

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