Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Free OpenStreetMap Vector Tile Hosting

Hi HN,

After 9 years of running my own OpenStreetMap tile server infra for MapHub (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11389989), I’ve open-sourced it and launched OpenFreeMap — offering free, unlimited map tile hosting.

OpenFreeMap provides free map hosting for websites and apps with no limits, no registration, no API keys, and no cookies. It’s also fully open-source: see the code at https://github.com/hyperknot/openfreemap and the styles at https://github.com/hyperknot/openfreemap-styles.

Why?

Using OpenStreetMap data usually requires paying for hosting or dealing with complex self-hosting. I wanted to make it easy and accessible for everyone.

How does it work?

Tiles are served directly from Btrfs partition images containing 300 million hard-linked files, avoiding the overhead of a tile server and leveraging Linux kernel file caching.

Key components:

- Tile Generation: Planetiler (https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler)

- Hosting: Nginx serving tiles from Btrfs images on dedicated Hetzner servers.

- No Cloud Services: Optimized file serving on dedicated hardware.

How is it free and unlimited?

With enough donations and subscriptions, I hope to cover bandwidth costs.

Looking forward to your feedback!