We run Maptoolkit, a commercial maps stack, and it's built on two communities: OpenStreetMap's data and the MapLibre open-source ecosystem. Without them we wouldn't have a business. So we run a free community tile server on OSM data that anyone can use, with no API key, no sign-up, no cookies and no tracking.

Every week we rebuild the whole basemap from the full OSM planet, so the map reflects recent edits rather than a months-old snapshot.

What you get:

• Vector basemaps built from weekly OSM data, hosted in the EU and cached across 350+ locations.
• 3D terrain, global hillshading, contour lines and water depths in the tiles, out of the box. Data goes up to zoom 15.
• Seven styles ready to use: Summer, Light, Hiking, Winter, Dark, Street and Cycling. You can also design your own with our map style editor MapMaker: recolour and restyle the whole map with no code, or edit the raw style if you want full control. It is, in our opinion, among the best map style editors around right now.
• It works anywhere MapLibre-style maps do (MapLibre GL JS, Leaflet, OpenLayers) on web and mobile. If you're on one of the maps you already use, the setup is a single style URL:

style: 'https://styles.maptoolkit.org/summer.json'

Why it's free

The underlying infrastructure is live and paid for by our commercial customers, so opening it up to hobby, community and open-source maps costs us very little on top.

A few things to know:

• Non-commercial use is always fine: personal, hobby, open-source, academic. Commercial use is fine too if you're under EUR 1M annual revenue and have fewer than 10 employees.
• Fair-use limits are generous: 40 requests/second sustained, 200/second burst. If you ever need more, a one-minute registration raises the ceiling 10x.
• No SLA, uptime guarantee or support on the community tier. It's a give-back, run on best effort.
• This is the basemap only. Routing, geocoding, elevation and the other APIs are a separate commercial offering on maptoolkit.com.

Live demo and full license: https://www.maptoolkit.org/

Happy to answer anything in the comments, and feedback from this community especially would mean a lot to us.

I was making an open street maps app for my iPhone and ran into some trouble. It seems like the open source method for adding info in maps is to just add layers. Long story short adding lots of layers is problematic in iOS. Also for some reason the libraries that run in iOS hate apfs. Apple File System. Trying to read maps off of anything but fat runs into problems. After months of building my app got worse and worse the more features I added. So I started over.

I started from scratch using the amazing map data I had created for my app. I had capernicus dem elevation data for the whole world. Open street maps data and so much more packed into bite size state and country map packs. I just needed a native way to view them. So I started from the ground up building a pure swift application. I used metal to render everything so I could use the speedy gpu. It took me months but I’ve built the best map application for iOS I’ve ever tried. It’s fast. It can read maps from turtle slow drives attached to the iPhones usb c port. And it uses height data like a video game does so you get full 3d maps with live driven contour lines. Plus I built an actual 3d engine so you can walk the actual elevation of a hike in a walkthrough. I saw some other guys making hiking trail apps. I did it just because it was so easy with all of the data I have. The app tells you how hard the hike is based on the way the trail navigates the height map. Lots of elevation change means tougher. If you really want to see run through the hike in 3d and see for yourself.

When I realized I had fully offline maps I got to thinking. What would happen if gps died? So I built a sextant I just did it for fun but it turns out the iPhone does this really good. Like better than professional tools when done the way I set it up. So good I’ve got a patent pending. After calibrating each phone I’ve tried. I can get within a few hundred meters of your actual location with a clear night sky.

Then I got to thinking about my 3d height data. I’ve got a full real life 3d world built. If I can get your location down to less than a mile I bet an iPhone can triangulate your exact location based on elevation data and your horizon. Turns out it can. Your freaking iPhone once calibrated keeps your elevation down to centimeters. It’s crazy. And with such a small area to do math on given a specific elevation and the ability to draw real horizons at thousands a second if you take a scan of your sky it’s not hard for your phone to figure out right where you are standing. Not by comparing pictures of mountains. By comparing the actual elevations of mountains. The phone draws the pictures itself in pure math.

Anyway thanks everyone for all this open data. It makes things like my app possible. If you guys could help me test it I’d appreciate it. It all works for me but I’m a small test pool. LandNav.world