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Overview

In order to serve a web map, you need to serve the underlying map data in some way. The most common way to do this is to pay a company like Google or Mapbox to license their data. Of course, this costs money. Furthermore, you're tied to the service provider. In the summer of 2018, Google raised prices by 14x almost overnight. If you'd built your platform on Google Maps, you're stuck.

In any case, I wouldn't use Google Maps because their platform is much less friendly to developers. Mapbox's open source mapping apps are really easy to build upon, and are at the forefront of map tech.

Mapbox is much friendlier, with a rather generous free tier. Going with Mapbox services is not a bad option, but I chose against it for a few reasons:

• Free project. NST Guide is designed to be a free product, so I wanted to minimize current and future costs. By hosting my own map data, I can have clarity about expected costs with low variance month-to-month.
• Infrequent updates okay. One of the benefits of hosted maps like Mapbox is that they update from OpenStreetMap or other providers often. OpenStreetMap data is updated by contributors every day, so if you're interested in an area with a high rate of changes, you might be more interested in paying for their maps. For a trail map, constant updates aren't as important.
• Don't need worldwide coverage. My app is focused on the U.S. West Coast to start, and potentially eventually the whole US. I never expect to need coverage outside the continental US, so generating map data is much less complex than for the entire globe.
• Learning experience. A main goal with this project is to learn how map technology works, and by generating my own tiles I've been able to get a deeper understanding of vector tiles.
• Low risk. If I ever run into problems with my self-hosted map data, I can change a line of code, add a Mapbox API key, and be using their basemaps within an hour.