Ovid7

One example, but probably pretty representing : I saw a high-rated restaurant on a food ordering app in a big city, just this week. Opened Google - saw immediately the details for that place. Then opened OSM - the place wasn't even there.

This sort of thing is problematic for travel startups that help plan or share venues/places for example. We already heard some potential users of our product saying "we only use and trust google for maps/places", and realized the bar is quite high in terms of what we have to offer in that respect.

Regarding the ODbL licensed OSM data, good thing you mentioned that! Do you know by any chance what would be the magnitude of costs for licensed databases that would cover the majority of businesses/venues/places in the world (excluding non-touristic countries/cities, e.g N. Korea, Afghanistan, etc.)?

I'm trying to understand if that's really an option, or one must have Google's resources to be able to set up this sort of thing. (We do have the tech and engineering talent on our team, we're just somewhat scarce on our financial resources)

Thank you!

Maps - from my search of recent articles about it, it seemed that their Maps service has become quite costly too. Perhaps I'm wrong, we're still looking into it.

Data - it seems it's mostly OSM, which then leads us to thinking we're simply better off creating an OSM db ourselves then + put that content into a maps service that helps with tile serving. But then I'm not sure how cost effective it will be.

Interesting. We thought about it, but we found that for many venues it seemed to lack basic details.

Theoretically, we'd like to merge OSM data with some licensed databases. And then perhaps it could "compete" with Google's offering.

However, we're not sure which are good sources for the licensed DBs and how much do these licenses cost ? Is it something feasible?