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Comment by hampelm | Hacker News Reader

> To illustrate the cost savings, every additional 1,000 users that load a map on Google Maps costs 7 USD. An additional million hits to Cloudflare Workers costs fifteen cents.

That's certainly a selling point!

The whole ecosystem of tools is powerful, this tileserver is a great capstone and an interesting commercial model. What is your definition of End Product here? Eg if we have an app and website under one brand is that two end products or one?

How do updates work? Eg with mapbox or google you just get the "latest" data (modulo time it takes them to integrate data), does this hook automatically into the latest source?

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> What is your definition of End Product here? Eg if we have an app and website under one brand is that two end products or one?

One brand with web + mobile app would be one product. To be more explicit, a software development consultancy with multiple clients would need one license per client.

For updates, you are 100% in control of the data once it is on your S3. This means that it won't change from under you, change pricing, or disappear. This also means you'll have to explicitly copy updates from upstream, and I'm figuring out the right cadence for that (likely ~quarterly)

Can Backblaze B2 be paired with Cloudflare for similar effect at a lower storage cost? Backblaze does support an S3 compatible target [1].

[1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-b2-s3-compatible-ap...

EDIT: Thank you for the reply!

I've tested Backblaze B2 as a storage option, and I found that with the level of traffic a typical map backend incurs, there were enough 503 errors to cause problems. This is an intentional trade-off of the B2 design that allows them to set an aggressive price point: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/b2-503-500-server-error/

I'm constantly evaluating all of the different deployment combinations and new features on cloud providers, so part of the service I'm offering is advice for your specific provider and this workload.

> To illustrate the cost savings, every additional 1,000 users that load a map on Google Maps costs 7 USD. An additional million hits to Cloudflare Workers costs fifteen cents. That's certainly a selling point!

It gets even better. For example, Mapbox charges for every map load and again for every 12-hour period the map remains open.

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