I've been thinking about how much money gets wasted on development and staging environments that sit idle most of the time.

For example, DigitalOcean still charges you for a Droplet even when it's powered off. The only way to stop compute charges is to destroy it entirely.

But then you have to deal with snapshots, restoring env vars, networking, etc. whenever you need it again.

I'm curious how other developers deal with this. Do you just leave everything running and accept the cost? Destroy and recreate environments manually?

The usual way to put a map on a Drupal site is Google Maps. It is easy to start: get an API key, paste it in, and a monthly free allowance covers your first maps. After that, Google bills per map load. The map of a venue is the same for every reader, yet every view is a new request, counted and billed, and every reader's browser talks to Google while they look. The map doesn't change; the meter keeps running.

There is an open alternative to Google's data. OpenStreetMap is built by volunteers and published under an open licence. I wanted maps drawn from it that a site downloads once and keeps, so I built Maper.

What it does

• Your server downloads each map tile once, keeps it in private files, and draws the map itself. Browsers receive the finished drawing, never a tile, so no third party sees your readers.
• No API key and no per-view billing. Tiles come from OpenFreeMap, a free, donation-funded service, or from a Protomaps file you host yourself, in which case nothing is downloaded at all.
• It is polite to the tile provider: downloading stays off until you set a contact address. After that, every download respects daily and per-job limits, one request at a time, and backs off when the provider asks.
• Restyling is free. Tiles hold shapes and names, not colours, so switching or editing a map style redraws every map from the tiles you already have. Three styles ship today, and five more come in the next release.
• It works the Drupal way: a Maper map block for nodes (a venue, or the dates of a tour), and a Maper map format for Views, where every result row becomes a pointer with its own card.
• Headless if you want it: the server hands any front end the map as JSON, with a reference script in plain JavaScript.

Is it real?

It runs in production on Oído en Vivo, a live-music listings site in Colombia: 836 tiles, 69 MB, serving the maps of 550 places and every search. See it at https://oidoenvivo.com/buscar

Where it stands

This is 1.0.0-alpha1. It needs Drupal 11.2+, PHP 8.3 and a private file path. Alphas have no upgrade path, so reinstall between them. Beta comes next, and from then on every change carries an update.

• Project: https://www.drupal.org/project/maper
• composer require drupal/maper:1.0.0-alpha1

I'm the author. I'd welcome bug reports, rough edges and questions in the issue queue, or right here.

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).