Plain-English breakdowns of vendor pricing, India-first alternatives, and MapLibre migration playbooks. Numbers come straight from primary sources — every post links out to vendor docs and pricing pages.
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Ola Maps, Mappls, Google Maps, Mapbox, and maps.guru — which map APIs genuinely store data in India, what DPDP Act and RBI rules require, and why most edge-hosted providers cannot offer true India residency.
Google Maps, Ola Maps, Mappls, Mapbox, MapTiler, LocationIQ, and maps.guru — which India maps API to pick for delivery apps, fintech, logistics, real estate, and travel. Organised by what you are building, not by vendor.
Google, Mapbox, MapTiler, Mappls, and maps.guru all draw India differently. What the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1961 and the 2021 Geospatial Guidelines actually require, which providers render India official boundaries, and what your options are.
Practical cost-reduction tactics for teams stuck on Google Maps Platform — session-based loading, static maps, SKU downgrades, caching within ToS, the India billing wedge, subscription plans, and when migration actually pays off. With worked savings numbers.
Ola Maps, Mappls, LocationIQ, and maps.guru — honest comparison of the four best Google Maps alternatives for startups shipping from India. Free tiers, pricing, data residency, and the gotchas each one hides.
The March 2025 restructure killed the $200 credit. Per-SKU free tiers, three SKU categories, and Nov 2025 subscription plans — plain-English breakdown with worked cost examples at 100k, 500k, and 1M map loads.
BSD-licensed renderer, no API key required, open style spec. Concrete before/after code for Map, Marker, InfoWindow, and geocoding — plus the gotchas that bit us in production.
Practical maps engineering: cutting Google Maps Platform bills, migrating from Google Maps to MapLibre, how maps API pricing models actually compute, and choosing a provider for the Indian market. Posts include worked cost examples and cite primary vendor pricing documentation.
The highest-impact changes are using Autocomplete session tokens so a session is billed once instead of per keystroke, applying Place Details field masks to avoid paying for unused SKUs, swapping interactive maps for static images where interaction is not needed, and caching geocoding results for the 30 days the terms permit.
For a typical map view (basemap, markers, popups, camera control) it is a bounded change measured in days rather than weeks, because MapLibre covers the same primitives. The work concentrates in replacing Google-specific services such as Places Autocomplete and Directions.
The vocabulary these posts assume, in plain language.
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