Stamen Maps Will Be Hosted by Stadia Maps
Stamen won’t be hosting their iconic and very popular map tiles any more. Instead, Stadia Maps will host Stamen’s maps tiles going forward:
We’re partnering with Stadia to move our tiles to their servers, and working closely with them to make sure that our beloved map styles keep running well into the future, and better than ever. They’re experts in running well-maintained map serving infrastructure. For most users, switching over will be as simple as setting up a Stadia account, and changing a few lines of code. For most non-commercial customers, there’ll be no service disruption, no tracking, and the price tag will continue to be free.
Stamen’s tile service will be discontinued in October; until then existing tile URLs will redirect to Stadia’s servers.
What this means:
- You’ll need a Stadia Maps account.
- You need to point your application to the Stadia URLs by October.
- You might have to pay if you’re application serves more than 200,000 tiles per month or if you’re using the tiles with a commercial application.
- All Stamen map designs will be ported to Stadia, and most styles are now available as Vector tiles too.
Considering Stadia’s generous free tier this is a fair compromise. Stamen generously made their tiles available for free for a very long time. Running a tile service needs people and the infrastructure costs money, and we can’t take it for granted that a small cartography shop provides an essential service for free forever.