unmap as an alternative to HERE

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 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).
• You want a map, a search and a route from one object. new Unmap({ key, container }) draws the map, and unmap.geocoder and unmap.router hang off the same object, with no platform object or default-layer step in between (Quickstart). The map itself is MapLibre GL JS, which is open source.

When HERE 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). HERE lists car routing and geocoding coverage country by country, and publishes coverage information for each of its products.
• You need traffic as data. The HERE Traffic API serves real-time traffic flow and incidents. unmap drive times have no live or predicted traffic, and its road events are provincial closures and incidents, not traffic speeds.
• You price tolls or route electric vehicles. HERE Routing API v8 returns toll costs for a route and does EV routing. unmap can steer a route away from tolls but cannot price them, and has no EV routing.
• Truck compliance is load-bearing. HERE Routing API v8 has truck routing with its own coverage documentation. unmap's truck profile is a Developer Preview over OpenStreetMap tags, where Canadian height and weight limits are sparse, and it is not a permit check (Truck routing).
• You ship a native mobile app. The HERE SDK covers Android, iOS and Flutter, with turn-by-turn navigation. unmap ships a web SDK and no native mobile SDK.

How the bill compares

We could not verify HERE's published prices, so this page lists none and links HERE's own pricing page above. Read your HERE invoice against how unmap counts.

unmap has one meter. 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 and preview origins 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. Plans and limits has the detail.

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. So if your HERE bill counts map sessions or map views, multiply them by about 40 for a first-paint estimate of unmap calls. A geocode, a route or a travel-time area is one request and one call. A 10 by 10 /matrix request is one call too, whatever the provider counts for the same grid.

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.