Paid premium map tile usage service of OSM's tilesets

[danstowell]

OSM.org's main tilesets are given away for free, but subject to a usage policy which means heavy use gets blocked. This is understandable, of course. The idea is that once some third party becomes a heavy user, they should be using a paid tile service from some OSM-using company, or should serve/render their own tiles.

It has been suggested that this is not a good incentive structure for people/companies to get on board with OSM. Instead, goes the suggestion, why not allow heavy users to pay OSM/OSMF some monthly rate, continuing to use the tiles and giving OSM/OSMF some income?

I can think of two types of objection to this idea.

One is that it's a kind of unfair competition against commercial third-party tileservers. I don't see that as a big deal, because the paid service would still be bare-bones (no customised tiles or whatever, low customer support guarantees), and there's no need for OSMF to go into a pricing battle with third parties, so third parties can still outcompete on price and on product.

The other is about the technical infrastructure to support it. The accounting and handling of premium tile accounts would need to be developed. The tileserver system would presumably need upscaling to handle at least an order of magnitude more bandwidth, and there may be other important ops considerations.

I'm writing this proposal out because to me it seems one of the least controversial and most achievable of the moves that were proposed in the Feb 2018 conversation. The benefits would be increased visibility of OSM as a standard source for maps, better incentives for companies/orgs that are "mere users" of map services to get onboard, and some income to OSMF.

[amandasaurus]

I'm 50:50 on paid tiles. I do think it would be good to give people an easy way to use OSM, and it could be an interesting, new, decentralized revenue source for the OSMF.

One big problem: Who's going to maintain it? Who's going to be the sysadmin(s)? OSM does have sysadmins now who work for free. Would they be willing to work for free if there were paid tiles? (Has anyone actually asked the OWG? 🤔) If someone agrees to work for free, then you are limited in telling them what to do. You can hardly phone someone up at 9pm on a Friday to tell them a customer has a problem. etc. Paid sysadmins would solve that problem. What would that cost? €200k p.a.? Where's that coming from? etc.

[mikelmaron]

There's not only the bandwidth costs, and the maintenance costs, but legal costs of setting up the contracts, managing accounts, doing customer service. It's really hard and resource intensive to do a product service well.

Do I think OSMF is capable of doing this? Sure, if we really really focused and put a lot of energy into it. Do I think that's where we should put our energy? No, because there are so many other things I think we should prioritize; I do think the OSMF and osm.org should providing more to the community.

What I do think would help the community are more clear usage policy limits -- more specific information on what's a tolerable usage level. Clarity on what osm.org and OSM tiles are for, and neutral but accessible choices (roll your own or services) to look into if you go above those limits.

And full disclosure, I am both on the OSMF Board and lead the Community team at Mapbox. Mapbox obviously offers map services, and the Community team is ready to support OSM community users who go above our free tier. However, I'm speaking on this ticket as myself, not representing either the official Board position or Mapbox, and I'd have the same views if I had neither of those affiliations.

[Firefishy]

Most of our hosting agreements limit us to running non-commercial services. Hosting would need to be renegotiated.