Cost & pricing · 6 min read
Cost Comparison: Traditional Tile Hosting vs. Pay-for-Storage
A realistic look at monthly costs when you pay per view versus when you pay only for storage—and when each model wins.
How you pay for tile hosting—per request, per GB egress, or per GB stored—can change your monthly bill by an order of magnitude. Here’s a simplified comparison to guide your choice.
Traditional tile hosting
Many services charge for tile requests or for egress. A busy map can generate millions of tile requests per month; at fractions of a cent per request or per GB, costs scale with traffic. That’s fine for small projects but can get expensive when a map goes viral or you open data to the public.
Pay-for-storage only
With a storage-only model, you pay for how much you store. Views and egress are unlimited (or very high). Your bill is predictable: it grows when you add data, not when more people look at it. That suits internal dashboards, public portals, and partner integrations where traffic is hard to cap.
When each wins
Request- or egress-based pricing can be cheaper if you have very little traffic and lots of data. Storage-only wins when traffic is high or variable and you want predictable costs. For most teams serving maps to more than a handful of users, storage-only (with zero or minimal egress) is the safer and often cheaper option.