Mapzen

» see mapzen.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Mapzen sold map APIs the way anyone sells an API, by the request, with a price list. The difference was that every engine behind those requests was published under an open license, so a customer could stop paying at any moment and run the identical stack on their own hardware. That is a strange thing to build a business on. Samsung paid for it for four years anyway.

The lab opened in 2013 in New York, inside the Samsung Accelerator, run by Randy Meech, who had been SVP of engineering at MapQuest. The team came out of the OpenStreetMap world rather than the satellite-imagery world, and the output showed it: Pelias for address search, Valhalla for turn-by-turn routing, Tangram for rendering, Tilezen for vector tiles. Two data projects came alongside the software. Who's On First was a gazetteer that gave every place on earth a stable identifier. Transitland pulled together public transit feeds from agencies that had never agreed on a common anything.

The pitch was aimed at developers who wanted a map without a lock-in clause attached to it. Mapzen's own wording was that they built things so you could build things, and the licensing backed it up: permissive open-source terms on the software, CC-BY or straight public domain on the data. For a few years around 2015 it was the obvious answer for anyone who needed geocoding and did not want to send every query to Google.

I did not build on Mapzen. The geo work I have done lives on the device side, where a map is a layer underneath a camera feed rather than a product in itself, and the hosted-API question never came up for me. What I recognize is the shape of the bet. Give the engine away, charge for the servers, and hope the servers turn out to be the hard part. They usually are not.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the money question ~

Nobody at Mapzen has ever explained the finances in public, and the shutdown post does not try. What is visible from outside is that the free tier was generous, the paid tier was cheap, and the whole operation sat on a corporate parent's budget line rather than on revenue. Samsung Research America carried it. When Samsung stopped carrying it, there was no second leg.

The migration guide they published on the way out gives away how little they minded. It opens by telling customers they have two options, either a competing hosted API or their own servers running the same open-source projects, and both get the same careful treatment. Then it sends people to Mapbox and GraphHopper and OSRM by name. Underneath the routing section it says Valhalla is open source, read below for how to run it locally. A company protecting revenue does not write that paragraph.

~ january 2018 ~

The post appeared on 2 January 2018, titled "Mapzen Shutdown :(" with the emoticon in the headline. "Unfortunately, we have some sad news. Mapzen will cease operations at the end of January 2018. Our hosted APIs and all related support and services will turn off on February 1, 2018." They added that nobody would be charged for December or January usage, and thanked everyone for the past four years.

Then came an unusual month. On 8 January the blog ran "Mapzen Post Mortem I", headed with a line of T. S. Eliot about not knowing what you know. Randy Meech wrote Post Mortem II on 9 January, on why Mapzen had used open data exclusively, and Post Mortem III on 29 January, subtitled "A Letter Just to You". On 30 January the tiles team posted a long-term support plan for the maps. On 31 January, the last working day, Julian Simioni posted about what was next for Pelias. Four weeks of a company writing its own obituary in installments, and in none of them does anyone say why Samsung pulled the plug.

~ the afterlife ~

Pieces of it kept running before the ink was dry on the shutdown post. Nextzen picked up the vector tiles with a long-term support build, paid for through 2018 by an Amazon research credits award, and the December 2017 global tile build went into a public S3 bucket. The Pelias people launched Geocode Earth, a hosted version of their own geocoder, and the migration guide cheerfully listed it next to the competitors. Then on 29 January 2019, almost exactly a year after the last post mortem, the Linux Foundation announced that Mapzen was becoming one of its projects. Valhalla and Pelias are both still in use in 2026, inside products with no connection to Samsung at all.

mapzen.com is still being served, and reading it is a specific kind of uncanny. The marketing copy is intact and present-tense, promising maps in minutes on JavaScript, Android, iOS and Tizen. The copyright line says 2021. Half the navigation has been commented out of the template rather than deleted, so Pricing and Jobs and Terms and Status are all sitting in the HTML source as dead links that never render. The code sample on the homepage still builds a working map. It loads its JavaScript from nextzen.org.

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