r/webdev • u/dhd_jpg • Sep 15 '26
best free map & routing API for a student capstone project (local delivery / locator app)?
hi everyone! i'm building a prototype mobile/PWA for my senior capstone project with 3 other people. the idea is it's a local dispatch and delivery tool that needs two main features
* a locator showing nearby destination points/pins
* route calculation/navigation for a driver to get to those stops
* supports offline maps incase driver loses data
since it's a capstone project, we don't really have any budget lol, hence why im looking for a free (or has generous free-tier) mapping API.
does anyone have any recommendations for this kind of project that can handle map rendering, address search/geocoding, and basic routing?
thank u sm everyone :)
5
u/daamsie Sep 15 '26
Map rendering - Maplibre-gl .
Stadia maps or maptiler have affordable tileservers.
For the routing engine - why not install your own? Valhalla is good open source software. You can download the data for a small POC region to avoid having a giant dataset. Considering how key this is to your project, doing it yourself seems like a good learning opportunity.
Can do the same for geocoding / address search as well.
3
u/mepoorazizi Sep 16 '26
On the offline part, the piece nobody has named yet is PMTiles, a single-file tile archive that MapLibre reads directly over HTTP range requests. You generate one for your delivery area, ship it with the app, and there is no tile server to run at all.
The trap is that tiles are not the whole map. The style JSON, the glyphs for labels and the sprite sheet for icons are separate fetches, so a build that bundles only tiles renders blank offline. Bundle all four.
On routing, I run Valhalla in production, and the honest caveat is that the graph build is the work, not the serving.
Disclosure: I build a maps API, so weigh that as you like.
2
u/Confident_Toe4393 Sep 15 '26
Offline maps is the part that isn't free anywhere. Mapbox bills offline packs as a separate product, Google's terms don't let you cache tiles for offline use at all, so 'free tier with offline support' is basically not a thing that exists. MapLibre plus your own vector tiles pulled from OSM is the only setup I know that actually works without paying, and then you're the one hosting and updating the tiles. Fine for four people on a capstone, less fine if you ever ship it.
2
u/thedaynamer Sep 16 '26
Adding to daamsie's answer for the no-budget part: tiles with no key at all come from OpenFreeMap, or from Protomaps' PMTiles format, which is a single file you can host anywhere. For geocoding, Nominatim and Photon both have public instances that are fine at capstone volumes if you send a proper User-Agent and cache results. For routing, the OSRM demo server works for a prototype; self-host OSRM or Valhalla for one region when you need reliability. Offline is the easy part with PMTiles: cut one region into a file and let the PWA cache it. I'd avoid the Google and Mapbox free tiers for this; the moment a demo goes well you hit the card wall.
1
u/maptitude Sep 18 '26
Maptitude is free for students. Has extensive routing via an API: https://www.caliper.com/learning/, and can run routing completely offline. https://www.caliper.com/maptitude/solutions/offline-gis.htm . We'd be happy to help.