Improving the world bit by expensive bit

October 6th, 2021 by

We’re delighted to announce our sponsorship of Organic Maps. Organic Maps is a simple, user-friendly application that downloads complete Open Street Map data to your phone, allowing you to use their mapping application offline complete with route planning from the on-device database.

This is a wonderful application. It doesn’t track you, advertise at you or flood you with non-notifications, and it works without mobile data and conserves battery life. So if you’ve ever been lost without signal or somewhere where roaming data is prohibitively expensive, or to a very busy location where the mobile networks were overloaded this application is genuinely better than the alternatives.

While the app avoids the need for mobile data, this comes at the cost of a significant up-front download of all the mapping data that you may or may not use offline. This won’t trouble typical home broadband, but for the servers at the other end it adds up quickly. We’ve stepped in and offered two 4GB virtual servers with 400TB/month of free bandwidth to Organic Maps, split between our London and Amsterdam zones, reducing the reliance on a traditional and bankruptcy-inducing large cloud provider.

Quote from unspecified cloud provider of $24,452 per month

“Use the cloud, it’s cheap,” people often say, incorrectly.

Quote from unspecified cloud provider of $20,591 per month

A competing quote from a slightly cheaper large cloud provider

 

At our list prices this would be somewhat cheaper:

Qty Item Item price Price
2 VPS4 virtual servers (4TB/mo bandwidth) £32.14 £64.28
396 Additional bandwidth (per TB) £5 £1,980.00
Total £2,044.28

Being 90% better value is achieved in part by not having to fund our own space programme.