unmap as an alternative to Stadia Maps

When unmap is the better fit

• You want to keep what you fetch, from the first paid plan. Our terms let you cache maps and geocoding results permissively, and what you have cached stays yours after you cancel. Stadia Maps' terms of service require an active Standard, Professional or Enterprise plan to store geocoding results permanently, and its pricing page marks Free and Starter as temporary storage.
• 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 in Canada. mode=transit routes and draws travel-time areas on scheduled Canadian transit (Transit routing). Stadia Maps' documentation lists no transit routing.
• 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 Stadia Maps 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). Stadia Maps documents a full routing set, Standard Routing, Isochrones, a Time/Distance Matrix, Optimized Routing and Map Matching, next to elevation and time zones, all drawn from one credit pool.
• Your app mostly shows maps. A vector or raster tile is 1 credit, and Starter is $20 a month for 1,000,000 credits (Stadia pricing). That is about a million tiles, where unmap's Indie plan includes 250,000 calls, tiles included.
• You need satellite imagery. Stadia's Standard plan adds satellite, at 4 credits a tile (Stadia pricing). unmap has no satellite or hybrid imagery: it serves vector tiles.
• You want to try everything before you pay. Stadia offers a 14-day Professional trial with no obligation, and an account that does not upgrade goes back to the free plan (Stadia pricing). unmap's dev plan is free, but it is for building, not production.
• You want a navigation SDK. Stadia lists Ferrostar, a navigation SDK, among its SDKs. unmap ships a web SDK and no native mobile SDK.

How the bill compares

The table above is Stadia's first paid plan, Starter, and what one request costs inside it, in Stadia's own credits, as read on the date shown. Stadia sells monthly credit bundles, and each API has its own weight: a tile is 1 credit, a forward or reverse geocode 20, a standard route or an isochrone 20, an optimized route 40, and a matrix 10 per element (Stadia pricing). The pricing page does not say which plan first includes each routing API, so the table has no routing rows. Two limits shape the comparison: the free plan is for non-commercial or evaluation use only, and storing geocodes permanently needs Standard ($80 a month) or higher. Stadia's terms are being revised, effective 9 November 2026, so read the current version before you rely on them.

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. Plans and limits has the detail.

For maps the units line up: a tile is 1 credit on Stadia and one call on unmap. A map's first paint on unmap is about 40 calls, almost all of them tiles, and after that MapLibre and the browser serve most tiles from cache. Stadia's Starter credits stretch about four times as far as Indie's calls on tiles alone, so for an app that mostly shows maps, Stadia can cost less.

Search and routing are where the weights part. A geocode is 20 credits, so Starter's million credits are about 50,000 geocodes, where Indie's 250,000 calls are 250,000 geocodes. Autocomplete v2 is the exception at 1 credit, the same as one call. A route or an isochrone is 20 credits and one call. A 10 by 10 matrix is 100 elements, or 1,000 credits, and 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.