We built this because we needed it.

Maps for Developers is built and operated by Houston IT Developers, a software company in Houston, Texas. It started as infrastructure for our own products rather than as a business plan.

We kept running into the same wall. An application would need to show a piece of land — who owns it, whether it floods, whether it is wetland, whether it is federal — and the answer was always some combination of a metered mapping platform, a separate parcel data licence, and a pipeline someone had to build and then keep alive. The mapping bill grew with usage, and the data was a second contract on top.

So we built the pipeline. It downloads cadastral data from state programmes and individual county assessors, reprojects it out of whatever state plane coordinate system it arrived in, tiles it, and publishes it as PMTiles archives. Then it does the same for flood zones, wetlands, public lands, the survey grid and hydrography.

Once that existed, the marginal cost of letting someone else use it turned out to be close to nothing — which is the entire reason the pricing on this site is a flat monthly number rather than a meter. We are not being generous. The costs genuinely do not scale with your traffic, so charging as if they did would just be a pricing tactic.