They used to be low-cost _and_ open source. Now they're source available and not interested in anything but big clients. I was using Mapbox for all my clients before their unopen sourcing, and I tried reaching out three times to ask about options for one of my clients. It wouldn't have been a huge amount of money, probably a few hundred per month, but they never, ever reply. That client wasn't even using any of their server resources, they are 100% self hosted, it's just that Mapbox now charges even for using their client. Anyways, I was trying to give them money, and they wouldn't even acknowledge I exist. I switched that client over to Maplibre and never looked back.
The other thing that annoys me is that they've more or less abandoned all their open source repos without even as much of a notice in the README. All these amazing tools sitting there with open pull requests and no one responding for years. If they just did a clean break, put a notice on everything they weren't going to touch again, it would have been a lot better/easier for the community to fork and move on with their lives.
The hosting and bandwidth costs are huge, and most of your customers (by raw count and nominal usage) are hobbyists or free products unwilling to pay even a few cents per user.
VC funding? I think they were funded mostly by grants and their own revenues for the first few years. Then they started taking VC money (over $300M to date).
They were once Development Seed [0], a company that specialized in making geo spatial visualizations for the UN, NGOs and nonprofits. Development Seed was a large contributor of code and modules to Drupal 6 which they left. In the beginning, their open source mapping and geo spatial visualizations projects were mostly funded by grants from the Knight Foundation which funded news related projects. MapBox came from an in-house tool they developed to create and manage map overlay tiles. (I could be making this all up.)
And since the state of the open source map rendering art is consisting almost exclusively of pre-licence-change forks of mapbox code these days, they kind of still are.
I wonder if Strava's recent acquisition of fatmap.com eventually boils down to them cutting ties with mapbox via acqui-hiring some mb-libre excellence. I could imagine Strava, due to the extreme map-centric nature of their product, bleeding quite considerable money to mapbox.
MapLibre has made really good strides (especially on the web) since the fork—3d-terrain support, more tile sources, other DX improvements (e.g., conversion to TypeScript).
I’m interpreting the comment above to mean Strava was/is a user of Mapbox and bought Fatmap in an effort to wean themselves off of Mapbox and use “inhouse” (Fatmap) mapping tech.
I took a superficial glance at what the site is loading and iirc there were plenty of the usual suspects in there. And it would be silly to do it any other way, because their product is what they do with maps, not winning some NIH purity award.
1. Subsidize low costs with venture capital and take on a ton of customers at a loss
2. Lock those customers into your API somehow. Enough code is effectively lock in for a while.
3. Change your pricing to be profitable.
4. Hopefully get acquired before all your customers leave
