Capitalising on the Google Maps pricing announcement

I remember seeing a post somewhere about a plug and go docker environment for OSM tiles - which was one devevloper's response to making switch2osm easier. Maybe posts to dev sites? Maybe alert register.co.uk? Computer press - needto be fast here for copy deadlines

Switch2osm is great but somewhat dated these days. I have been working through most of the tutorials over the years and some are hard to complete without an exceptional understanding of the concepts.
The Google Maps alternatives presented by geoawesomes is a mess. This list looks like it was compiled by a search engine with frameworks and service providers thrown into the same pot. The only real alternative on the list being Mapbox (API, data, frontend framework). Mapbox however is not cheap neither. I am myself a heavy Mapbox user.
IMHO the flagbearer for OSM as a free service right now is Klokan with https://openmaptiles.org and https://www.maptiler.com
I have investigated the possibility to host a free instance of open map tiles at GEOLYTIX but my infrastructure and maintenance knowledge are not up to the task and my time is extremely limited right now.

You were looking at it back in September hey Dennis? I know User:someoneelse has been giving the switch2osm.org tutorials and run through and update about a month ago, so I think it might be out of date to say that they are out of date :-) Maybe we should put a big "last updated" date on there.

In general doing a full "install from source" run-through is always going to be a bit complicated I think, but obviously it helps if the instructions work! Some people were suggesting we should have an "install using docker" tutorial on there too. Problem is that's more content to maintain, and there is a lot of different ways of installing a tile server.

I have editing access to switch2osm.org as does RichardF who wrote most of it in the first place. Kind of a UK project! Although Paul Normal had a lot of input too. For my part, with the google announcement I was spurred onto updating a few broken links on the rest of the content pages there. I hope it's in pretty good shape now, but obviously there's more we could do with it.

That is right. I looked last at switch2osm in September (2018) when Carto announced that their free tile service will end. We went then through the tutorials but made a decision to go with Mapbox due to our lack of expertise to get these services going and more importantly, maintain and scale ourselves.

I think openmaptiles is only free pre-production an non-commercial - see extract from their website

"Free data

We love the open-source and open-data community. That is the reason why we work on the OpenMapTiles project in the first place, and why we publish the pre-generated OpenStreetMap vector tiles completely for free.

The FREE tiles are legally usable for:

open-source and open-data community project websites
non-commercial personal projects
evaluation and education purposes

Any other use (esp. integration with applications deployed in production, commercial products, mobile apps, official institutional web portals, etc.) require purchase of the rights for the tiles we have created - which allow us to maintain and develop this project further.

It is great to see our map tiles and our open-source software actively used! "

"non-commercial personal projects" ... I believe this relates to their hosted map tiles ("source" vector tiles), and that they provide all of the software to generate and host your own vector tiles from scratch, starting from raw OSM data. I want to give that a run through myself some time to see how easy it is, but it looks very promising particularly if you can run docker.

What do you think the the target market will be?
My answer is small and medium businesses and small and medium web development and hosting companies.
Agree that Register is a good place, also How To Geek - but lots of similar companies and bloggers.
Question - is there a WordPress plugin for OSM?

I think you are right with the target market. The example I found was https://walkiees.co.uk/ a one-person part-time business earning money through adverts that wants a simple map with a point plus an area map with multiple points. Here's my dog: https://walkiees.co.uk/walks/sussex-east/up-devils-dyke

I have to agree with Dennis' view here.
At work I am the entire IT department, I always have multiple demands on my time and no-one to offload it to.
I've looked at adding mapping to some of our products on a number of occasions and my heart says I should go down the OSM route but it's just not straightforward enough.
Leaflet looks appealing and but then I have to find a tileserver and the documentation on what's available isn't centrally complete, correct or clear.
So, for a couple of small data visualisation use cases it was just a whole lot simpler and quicker to go with Google, tick something off my list and move on.
Now, with the changes to Google's pricing I accept there are changing factors in what the right answer might be, but if I as someone who believes in OSM find it too hard to be worth the time investment what hope do others have?
Before reaching out to potential users of OSM, there needs to be a coherent point of reference to direct them to that guides them through the range of what is available from OSM. e.g. choose an API, e.g. leaflet (and others). Choose your map style from a list of providers of tiles, with a nice gallery of styles along with pricing to make it easy to make a comparison. Don't find something you like, you can run your own tile server...

I suppose, one problem is that people view a map product as a thing. e.g. Google Maps, Bing Maps, OSM. But OSM isn't 'a thing' it's what? a dataset that can be rendered by anyone into a set of map tiles. The 'thing' that people see as OSM and therefore most directly compare with Google and Bing is the openstreetmap.org map, but the documentation discourages people from using that as a tile source so it's all just a much more difficult / confusing option to work through than just choosing Google or Bing.

I'm aware that this is also part of the benefits of OSM in that you can have the data and render it any way you like, I'm just saying that for a potential user of maps, OSM is a harder thing to get a grasp of and to have confidence in one's own understanding of the correct/best way to proceed.

I'm ready to be educated / shot down, but I'm sure I'm not the only one that thinks like this.
Al.

Draft Press Release for comment. If someone else wants to be media contact - feel free