Maps belong to everyone.

Your taxes already paid for this

Public space agencies have spent decades photographing the planet in extraordinary detail, and they publish the results. High-resolution satellite imagery of nearly every square kilometer of Earth is sitting in public archives right now, free for anyone to download. It is one of the great achievements of publicly funded science, and you own a share of it.

But raw imagery isn't a map

You cannot hand someone a satellite archive and call it a map. The imagery arrives as enormous scenes in projections nobody's browser understands, and it has to be reprojected, color-corrected, stitched, and cut into the little square tiles that map libraries actually draw. That transformation is real work.

It is also, and we want to be precise about this, not hard. It is a well-understood pipeline built from open-source tools and documented formats. A small team can run it. We do.

Easy, sold as magic

Several companies figured this out long before we did, and then made a choice: rather than explain how straightforward the pipeline is, they hid it behind a beautifully simple API and priced it like a secret. The API really is simple to use — that part is genuine and worth paying for. What isn't genuine is the implication that the thing behind it is rare.

So the bill arrives with per-map-load SKUs, volume tiers, seat counts, and a sales call to find out the real number. The terms arrive too: don't cache this, don't store that, don't show our data next to someone else's map, don't take it offline, don't build anything from it. None of that follows from the cost of serving a tile. It follows from a business model.

So here's the same API, without the cage

MoogleGaps is just as easy to use, and isn't owned by anyone who sees your maps as a margin to protect. Point MapLibre or Leaflet at our endpoints and you have a map. The difference is what happens next:

• Public data stays public. We don't launder open data into a proprietary asset. Our terms follow the licenses of the data underneath — freely distributable imagery with attribution, and ODbL for the OpenStreetMap-derived vector and geocoding data.
• Pricing tracks the infrastructure. Storage, bandwidth, and a little compute. We publish the whole price list on one page because it fits on one page.
• Offline is normal, not a tier. Download the areas you need and ship them inside your app. Maps shouldn't stop working because the network did.
• We're not optimizing our margins. We'd rather maps got used in all the places where they'd help but currently aren't worth the licensing conversation.

That's the whole manifesto. If you want to argue with it, or you have a use case we haven't thought about, tell us.