To begin, we'd like to thank you all for the overwhelming support! We're very grateful and proud to be building for such a supportive community 🫶

After the last update, we received a lot of feedback about the new map styles. While it was a bit disheartening at first, it showed us how serious gpx.studio users are about route planning. This motivated us to invest time in creating our own map styles, as well as deploying our own map tile infrastructure.

Creating a map style from scratch would have taken us a year. Instead, we've built upon two existing projects: 

We combined these two projects to create a map style that highlights trails, mountain peaks and passes, and natural parks. In addition, we implemented a tool to transform Mapterhorn terrain data into vectorized contour lines and hillshading for the entire planet, creating a nice topographic map feel.

We also included the classical OSM style from OpenMapTiles and version of it with our contour lines and hillshading layers.

Next to that, we created a custom satellite style using the same ingredients. It currently uses satellite imagery from MapTiler under the hood, but we hope to one day switch to open satellite imagery thanks to the second phase of the Mapterhorn project.

This is our first attempt at creating open topographic and satellite styles, so please let us know what you think! We've also shared them with the OpenFreeMap project in the hope they can be improved and maintained by a wider community.

Tile infrastructure 🤖

As gpx.studio's user base continues to grow every day, relying on a commercial tile provider becomes increasingly expensive, even with the generous discounts we've been lucky to receive in the past. Therefore, while we were busy experimenting with map styles, we also commited ourselves to deploying our own tile infrascture.

Thanks to Planetiler, it's possible to generate map tiles for the entire planet in a matter of hours, allowing us to publish weekly updates. Then, thanks to the PMTiles format, we can host and serve these tiles through Cloudflare for what is expected to be very manageable costs.

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Thank you for reading, and for your continued support! 🙌