Api.Wikiocity - Open for Free Beta

Hey everyone, I just wanted to announce that our new tile server product Api.Wikiocity is finally up and ready for use in our free beta.

I've been a long time fan of OpenStreetMap, and over the years I've built a lot of backend services for Wikiocity and some of our other sites. About a year ago when I went to upgrade our services, it became clear that there still weren't any products that fully had everything we needed. Especially not at a decent price. So we decided to rebuild everything, design a new map server with full vector tile support, and create a public api with all the things we were missing in others. We wanted a real analytics dashboard that would track individual key usage, as well as break down individual service statistics. We needed rate limiting, along with a way to track throttled ips. We also needed a geocoding search that would place a point on a roof, and not just return a bunch of random coordinates a few states away.

After months of coding, extensive research, and quite a few headaches, we finally have it. Global CDN support, clustered highly available servers, and all the bells and whistles you expect. We have a new style based off of OSM Carto that we fully redesigned from front to back to be extremely easy to navigate, with a new more neutral look. The schema is as close as we could make it, but we wanted data that was more user and business friendly, loaded gradually from level to level, and did so at a smaller file size. There's also tons of fun details like dynamic lane sizes, crosswalks, sidewalks, and color coding for handicap accessible restrooms and transportation.

Over the next few months we plan on moving more of our backend to the public api, which will greatly increase our geocoding performance. For those of you who are more advanced and do your own serving, keep an eye on our Wikiocity Github page as we open things up.

So come check it out and let me know what you think. It is currently in beta, with tons of features still to be added, but we can confidently say that we've been using the services in production for a few months now. Nevertheless, we promise we won't charge a dime until we feel the platform is fully proven, and that we have a product that positions us at the best quality and price among our competitors.

tl;dr; A new tile server with sky high claims, but it's free, so give it a look.

Browse Our Map - https://api.wikiocity.com/map