Nothing lasts forever and Google Maps free accounts are no exception. They of course have a “free tier” and as long as your usage doesn’t go above a threshold you won’t be charged. I don’t like that risk, so we’re done google maps.
So where to? open street map, the open source equivalent of mapping data. When maps are free, fewer people get lost.
The journey begins. Leaflet.js is a non map specific library which is similar enough to GoogleMaps to make the transition easy. One gotcha I found was that GoogleMaps can automatically handle being resized and it will adjust the internal map center when the map element changes size. Leaflet.js requires calling “map.invalidateSize()” to realign the internal map. Easy fix. Otherwise OSM has been really great. The nice thing is, if something doesn’t exist on the map you can easily go add it.
So long Google Maps, it was fun while it lasted.