OpenFreeMap

Open and free custom maps for your website and apps.
data from OpenStreetMap.

[Zsolt Ero @hyperknot]

OpenFreeMap survived 100,000 requests per second

I was about to post about how nice the last 10 months of OpenFreeMap have been. The architecture has really proven itself to be great, Cloudflare has agreed to sponsor the bandwidth, Hetzner servers are super stable as always, serving tiles from Btrfs proved to be a great choice, nginx is amazing, and life is good.

Then, out of the blue, I'm getting reports that some tiles are not loading, which normally means tile generation bugs, but not this time. I look into the nginx logs and see this:

2025/08/08 23:08:16 [crit] 1084275#1084275: *161914910 open() "/mnt/ofm/planet-20250730_001001_pt/tiles/8/138/83.pbf" failed (24: Too many open files) ...

This is weird. I've never seen anything like this. I check nload, and it shows huge traffic. I log into Cloudflare and I see THIS for the last 24 hours.

What? 3 billion requests in 24 hours? What on Earth is that? Also, 215 TB of traffic from tiny, 70 kB files?

The article continues on my blog:
(link below)

[Boris Glumpler @borisglumpler]

The country map of Afghanistan above is actually an image that is dynamically generated from a Blade view using @OpenFreeMapOrg and puppeteer and then cached as a base64 encoded string as I don't really want to load a mapping library in every embed.

[OpenFreeMap @OpenFreeMapOrg]

@ffaebi @berttemme @maplibre OpenMapTiles has the best support as of today. The future I believe is https://t.co/kRasZeVrIf, but it's not yet supported as widely.

[Bert Temme @berttemme]

Demo highlight specific streets, using @OpenFreeMapOrg vector tiles in @maplibre
https://t.co/NIp4zTyzBA

[OpenFreeMap @OpenFreeMapOrg]

@berttemme @ffaebi @maplibre Yes, mbtiles are published weekly. This way you can get an pmtiles file with OpenMapTiles scheme.

[OpenFreeMap @OpenFreeMapOrg]

@ffaebi @berttemme @maplibre Protomaps is similar, it uses a different schema, so different themes are necessary for it.

On a technical level both allow self-hosting, S3 is cheap until your project is not popular. OpenFreeMap allows you to self host on a fixed-price VPS.

[Zsolt Ero @hyperknot]

One more amazing project using OpenFreeMap:
Streetview roadtrip simulator by @nealagarwal

Launched today and instantly became the #1 site using @OpenFreeMapOrg !

Neal reached out beforehand and generously provided a $150/month sponsorship via @github Sponsors, fully covering usage costs.

Thanks for your support, Neal, and congrats on the fantastic launch!

[Zsolt Ero @hyperknot]

Dan Snow created a beautiful website, https://t.co/QhBxzdcQli.

I love the minimal design, how immediately functional it is, and it even uses OpenFreeMap!

At the bottom of the About page, I found: "I was inspired by the OpenFreeMap project and wanted to use my own domain knowledge to do something similar."

I feel touched that I could inspire such a project! Keep on building many other great things like this!

[Zsolt Ero @hyperknot]

HERE maps just became 10x more expensive.

Turns out, they've been billing with the wrong unit price before: 0.00000899 vs 0.00008919

Now that's one thing you don't need to worry about with OpenFreeMap.

[Zsolt Ero @hyperknot]

Many of you don't know, but @OpenFreeMapOrg is hosted on 2 different servers in 2 different countries: one in Germany and one in Finland.
The DNS setup is configured so that if one server is offline, your browser automatically picks the other one.
I also made a tiny script that monitors both servers once per minute and sends me a Telegram notification in case one is down.
Normally I don't get anything, but in the last few days, I was getting some errors from the Finnish server. Yesterday it was offline for 18 minutes.
I woke up and saw that it was exactly the C-Lion1 cable which was in the news recently. They fixed it yesterday, so the downtime was probably related to this.
Luckily OpenFreeMap worked from the German server the whole time.

[Zsolt Ero @hyperknot]

That's a super nice and useful project, thank you for making it!

[Zsolt Ero @hyperknot]

Wow, super nice style, didn't know this is possible!

[Zsolt Ero @hyperknot]

GitHub user plon created an open-source real-time map using OpenFreeMap. It's showing free UIUC study spaces and empty classrooms.

The website is open source.
https://t.co/QRZ0hFUYED
https://t.co/QFtRiDGSRo

[Zsolt Ero @hyperknot]

Added two styles to @OpenFreeMapOrg. Dark and Fiord. You can use them but they are not polished like the three main styles shown on the homepage.

Readme:

Dark and Fiord is not yet complete. They are unmodified, which means they are exactly as they are on their source repo, with the only difference that fonts are set to Noto Sans.

To access Dark and Fiord, use these URLs:
https://t.co/lsF3mPufic
and
https://t.co/tUDgOvXfbR

[OpenFreeMap @OpenFreeMapOrg]

@rwbcodes I enabled DMs

[OpenFreeMap @OpenFreeMapOrg]

One month after launch, OpenFreeMap hit its first sponsorship goal of $175/month!

Thanks to our amazing supporters, we can now fully cover server costs. The project is officially self-sustainable!

[Zsolt Ero @hyperknot]

First month of OpenFreeMap

I launched OpenFreeMap on HN exactly a month ago. Well, it's not exactly correct, as I first submitted it to HN 5 days before, when absolutely nothing happened (1). The second time it became the 12th most successful Show HN of 2024 (until today), with 848 points!

What did I change during those 5 days? I went on Reddit and launched it on r/selfhosted, r/opensource, and r/webdev, each time iterating on the title and the description.

The great thing about Reddit was that it allowed me to interact with the community; some users even started a chat. It helped me realize what the important values of my project were - the self-hosting and open-source nature - while the free part isn't really special.

Which is strange, as the technically challenging part of this project is to offer free tile-hosting for public usage, but I guess developers are fed up with "free" projects - and I totally understand them.

Reception

I was worried about launching an open-source project, and I was especially worried about HN, a famous place where projects are torn to pieces and criticized harshly. To my biggest surprise, I got the total opposite on both Reddit and HN: very supportive and helpful comments!

Seriously, I was very humbled by how nice everyone was; I think it was one of the most positive Show HN threads I've read. The comments about the support plans/monetization were so on point that I decided to remove the whole section about support plans and simply choose GitHub Sponsors as the sole donation source.

On GitHub, the project got 2k stars in less than 2 weeks!

GitHub issues/discussions were about the following topics:

- Issues about bugs related to self-hosting and special setups - I believe I have fixed all of them by now. Thank you all for reporting them!
- Questions which I thought were obvious, but it turns out they definitely are not. For example, the fact that the map on the homepage has scroll and rotation disabled doesn't mean that you would have it disabled on your website. I need to explain this more in the documentation.
- And finally, there were some questions which were not directly related to OpenFreeMap, for example, transliteration issues in Planetiler.

I also got the first successful reports of self-hosting working, and one user even pointed out an amazing €4.5/month VPS from Contabo which is perfectly capable of running this project. I'm super happy to hear that, as it might be a key element for the future of this project.

Community contributions

CJ created a fantastic video on YouTube about this project. It's a great resource that contains a lot of information about the background of online maps and even has code examples in five different frameworks.

Traffic

In the last few days, traffic has started sky-rocketing. That's about 120 TB/month with the current speed on 2 servers.

I looked into it and discovered that Sony Music launched a project using OpenFreeMap; almost all the traffic comes from this single website.

It's actually quite a nice website; I like it. Technically, it has no reason to load the full planet map. This could be just a 500 kB GeoJSON file, but the world isn't full of GIS experts who know how to make a simplified GeoJSON file with countries and US states merged. (Hint if you want to do this: go to geojson. xyz)

The realistic alternative would have been for them to go with Mapbox or Maptiler.

So how much would this cost on those platforms?

This single website is making about 300 requests per second. That's about 777 million requests per month.

On Mapbox, it would be about 200 million "map loads." With a discount of $2 per 1,000 loads, it would be $400,000 per month.

On Maptiler, it would be $300,000 per month.

I'm actually really happy this works. If OpenFreeMap can serve $300,000 worth of map data on infrastructure which costs $175 per month, then I think it really has some value!

The Future and Financials

During this month, I have been thinking a lot about the future of this project, especially the financial part.

There are 3 parts:

1. Infrastructure cost
2. Maintenance work
3. Improvements and new features

The Server Cost

Currently, the server cost is about $175 per month, and the GitHub sponsors are at $105 per month. The first milestone would be to reach $175; then the project would cover the server cost! Please sponsor if you can!

This should be good for about 300 TB per month on Hetzner.

Of course, if Sony launches a few more projects on OpenFreeMap, then I will need to add more servers or figure out a way to limit the load. Some ideas:

1. Make a really simple-to-follow self-hosting guide for Contabo VPS. Everyone can set up their local instance for 4.5 EUR per month.
2. Make a guide for proxying and adding a per-user CDN.
3. Reach out to Bunny or Cloudflare for sponsoring a CDN.
4. As a last resort, limit extreme load coming from a single website, like over 1 million requests per day. This really is a last resort.

The Maintenance

The other part of the future is maintaining the project. This one has quite a black-and-white answer: I need to do this anyway. OpenFreeMap is the tile server for MapHub, and MapHub is my main income.

Basically, if I have to do it anyway, why not do it in the open?

Also, I'll remove the SLA part from the website. I want as good an SLA as possible; there is no point in differentiating and making two separate infrastructures, one with "free" load and one with "premium" load. The free service should have as good an SLA as possible.

Improvements

The third part of the future is improvements. For example, making new styles, fixing icons, etc. I believe this part can rightfully be connected to the financial success of the project. That is, priority #1 is to cover server costs, and if donations reach that, then I can invest time into improvements.

I'll work on the homepage to reflect these thoughts; I believe this direction could actually work.

If you have ideas about sponsorship, like which projects/foundations should I reach out to, please contact me.

(1) Well, not exactly true. kiwicopple, the CEO of Supabase, noticed it and became my first GitHub Sponsor. Thank you!

(If you want to read this post with formatting, images and links, you can find it on blog. hyperknot. com)

[Zsolt Ero @hyperknot]

Thank you @CodingGarden for the super nice video and for making examples in 5 (!) different frameworks!
I'll add a link to them on the official page!

[OpenFreeMap @OpenFreeMapOrg]

Thanks to our amazing community, we now have our first video tutorial for OpenFreeMap!

A big shoutout to @giswqs for integrating it into the Jupyter notebook environment!

[Qiusheng Wu @giswqs]

🚀 MapLibre Tutorial 15: Create stunning 3D maps using OpenFreeMap vector tiles—all with just a few lines of code! Best of all, it’s completely FREE and requires no API key!

🎥 Watch the video: https://t.co/gDCvjymZde
📚 Explore the playlist: https://t.co/XTajQn7yri
📝 Check out the notebook: https://t.co/rTUD8sdVwU
🌐 Try the demo: https://t.co/TokhjPFHmd

To learn more about @OpenFreeMapOrg, visit https://t.co/kpGqpOmNqC

#geospatial #opensource #leafmap #maplibre