We've received some great news for those of you who have chosen or are planning to choose Mapbox for the mapping service for your store locator. Read on for more on how this change will affect you.

First, a little history: under their old pricing system, Mapbox charged per tile that was was displayed inside the map in your store locator. The map typically comprised 4 tiles when it first loads and then when you moved the map around, new tiles might need to be loaded which were also added to the tiles consumed. In other words, the more the user interacts with the map, the more tiles are requested. This meant that it was very hard to determine how many tiles might be used by any particular visitor to your website as if they panned or zoomed the map it could vary from 4 tiles to hundreds.

Moving forward, Mapbox will charge by map load only and offers a very generous free usage tier of up to 50,000 map view per month which should be sufficient for 96% of our customers (only the highest 4% of our users would expect to incur any costs for using Mapbox). This is the same as the old, generous Google free usage tier (sadly, those generous free tier days are gone for Google ).

Measuring usage by map loads means that users interacting with your web map can toggle layers from non-composited sources on and off, zoom and pan around the map, and evem toggle between styles without affecting usage. The maximum session length for a map load is 12 hours so the user can even keep your store locator open for up to 12 hours with that all being considered a single map load. If a user has the same map open after 12 hours, they will count that as a new map load session.

If you wish to switch to Mapbox, you can do so from the 'Add to your Website' page in your admin console and selecting the Mapbox button. You'll need to sign up for a free Mapbox API key and then update the HTML installation code with the new code shown. Overall this should take no more than 5 minutes to migrate.