First month of OpenFreeMap

2k GitHub Stars, 300 req/sec, 2 TB per day

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.

Here are the before & after titles of the two submissions.

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 https://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!