alt Hacker NewsThere is another option.
- Get a (cheap) docker capable server.
- Install the OSM/Nominatim stack using docker.
Setting this up used to be a pita, but due to docker its super easy.
This has a couple of benefits.
Like fixed, predicable costs. You can whatever you want without thinking about weird API points which costs a random amount of money. You can serve whatever traffic you want and a cheap v-server gets you an astonishingly long way. There are no 3rd-party privacy issues you can just embed your maps without annoying cookie banners.
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I tried going that route and it unfortunately didn’t work well. At least in Europe OSM is missing a lot of house numbers and even has some larger flaws of missing data / invalid attributed streetnames.
In case others are looking at Nominatim, this is from the Nominatim docs:
"For a full planet import 128GB of RAM or more are strongly recommended. Do not report out of memory problems if you have less than 64GB RAM."
That's ~$150/mo at Hetzner on bare metal, $672/mo at Digital Ocean, starting at $487/mo at AWS. For a non-redundant, low-availability configuration.
Before you do this, triple check that that the buildings and addresses for the area you are interested in are actually there (and correct). I've tried to use this approach several times, and at least for Sweden, the results are basically unusable. Hugh amount of missing buildings and missing or incorrect data. Last I tried I think it got something like 20% of my queries correct.