Self-hosted Open-Source Cheap alternative for Google Maps API services

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Go Wombat

3 min readDec 19, 2019

When you need a map to embed it on your site, or you need to make an address autocomplete — the first thing you probably think about is Google Maps.
While this is the most straightforward and perfect solution, it can be quite expensive. And we’re, at Go Wombat Team, always trying to find cost-effective solutions for our clients.

There is an alternative called OpenStreetMap. It will require more effort to set up, but you will have full control over it, and the price you need to pay — is only the price for the server. For applications with a big load, it can be a great benefit. But let’s investigate.

Price comparison

Google Maps API

Google maps geocoding API costs 5$ per 1000 requests until it’s 100,000 requests, then 4$ until 500,000. So let’s say we have a maximum of 500,000 requests per month — that will cost $2100.

DigitalOcean Server

The cheapest server on Digital Ocean will cost $5 per month. But since we have 500,000 requests per month — probably it will be not enough. So an average server with 8 GB RAM, 4 CPUs, and 160 GB SSD disk — will cost $40. And even the top high-end server will cost $960. It will have 192 GB, 32 CPUs, and 3.75 TB SSD disk!

Tools to use

We used Photon for search-as-you-type with multilingual support and geocoding. Photon is an open-source geocoder built for OpenStreetMap data. It is based on elasticsearch — an efficient, robust, and highly scalable search platform.

Alternatively, you can use Nominatim for geocoding as well. But we found Photon simpler to set-up and use.

OSM Tile Server

So, if you want to go fully self-hosted, you will also need to render a map on your service. For that purpose, you will need to set-up an OSM Tile Server.

The main problem here, that’s from the different sources — the data for Tile Server may take up to 3 TB of space. And Volume on DigitalOcean for 3 TB will cost $300 per month.