unmap as an alternative to Geoapify

When unmap is the better fit

• You want to keep what you fetch. Our terms let you cache maps and geocoding results permissively, and what you have cached stays yours to keep and serve after you cancel.
• Your users search in Canada, in either official language. One record carries its English and French names, plus Indigenous-language names where the source data has them, and a query typed in Inuktitut syllabics finds the place. See Languages.
• You route transit riders on Canadian schedules. mode=transit routes and draws travel-time areas on scheduled Canadian transit (Transit routing). Geoapify's Routing API has transit and approximated_transit modes. Its docs say approximated_transit is built from OpenStreetMap transit routes, do not name the source for transit, and do not mention GTFS or timetables.
• You draw long travel-time areas. One /isochrone request takes up to four bands of up to 120 minutes each, and it is one call (Isochrone). Geoapify caps isoline range by plan, at 15 minutes on Free, 30 on API 10 and API 25, and 60 from API 50 up, and charges 1 credit per 5 minutes of range (Geoapify pricing).
• You search by legal land description. With the Legal Land add-on, a Dominion Land Survey or NTS description such as NW-25-24-1-W5 is an ordinary search query (Legal land).

When Geoapify is the better fit

• You search or route outside Canada. unmap's basemap is worldwide, but search and routing cover Canada only, and a route that leaves the country is a 422 (Coverage). Geoapify's catalogue is wide: IP geolocation, elevation, time zones, isolines and a route planner sit beside its maps, geocoding, places and routing. unmap has an equivalent for each, listed above, but with search and routing for Canada.
• You want a free tier you can ship. Geoapify's Free plan allows commercial and production use at 3,000 credits a day, with no card, as long as the app shows Geoapify and data-source attribution (Geoapify pricing). unmap's dev plan cannot list a production origin: it is for building, not production.
• You geocode in bulk. Batch geocoding costs 0.5 credit per address plus 2 per job, half the rate of a single geocode, so 1,000 addresses cost 502 credits (Geoapify pricing details). unmap's batch geocoding is one call per non-blank query, the same as a single search.

How the bill compares

The table above is Geoapify's first paid plan, API 10, and what one request costs inside it, in Geoapify's own credits, as read on the date shown. Geoapify sells credits per day, billed monthly: API 10 is $59 a month for 10,000 credits a day, and Free is 3,000 a day. A monthly comparison needs ×30, which makes API 10 about 300,000 credits a month and Free about 90,000. Each API has its own weight: a geocode, a reverse geocode or an autocomplete is 1 credit, an A-to-B route is 1, a matrix is the larger of sources and targets times the smaller (capped at 10), and an isoline is 1 per 5 minutes of range (Geoapify pricing details).

unmap has one meter instead. Every request is one call, tiles included, and every API draws from the same pool. Three bulk paths count work, not requests: batch geocoding is one call per non-blank query, a hosted batch job is one call per eligible row, and Optimize is one call per shipment a successful solve performs. The dev plan is free and for building, not production. Browser calls from localhost are not counted, except Optimize, which counts from every origin. Server-side calls and Optimize draw on 10,000 included calls a month. Indie is US$19 a month for 250,000 calls, then US$1.00 per 1,000. Growth is US$99 a month for 2,000,000 calls, then US$0.75 per 1,000. Included calls are counted per calendar month, so a busy day draws on the same monthly pool as a quiet one. Plans and limits has the detail.

The units differ most for maps. On unmap a map's first paint is about 40 calls, almost all of them tiles, and after that MapLibre and the browser serve most tiles from cache. A map tile is 0.25 credit on Geoapify, so the same 40 tiles are about 10 credits. API 10's 300,000 monthly credits cover about 1,200,000 tiles, where Indie's 250,000 calls cover 250,000, so for an app that mostly shows maps the tile weight counts in Geoapify's favour.

For search and routing the units line up: a geocode, an autocomplete request or an A-to-B route is one credit there and one call here. A route with more stops costs one credit per leg, plus one per 500 km past the first 500, and is still one call on unmap. Isolines and matrices part again. A 30-minute isoline is 6 credits, and a 10 by 10 matrix is 100 credits, where a /isochrone or a 10 by 10 /matrix request on unmap is one call.

To estimate your own bill, start from about 40 calls for a first paint on an empty browser cache. Panning and zooming add tiles, and return visits fetch fewer. Then add your searches and routes and set the total against a plan's included calls.