Description
We often get questions like "In your website it says you are an open source project but companies can make donations to you. How much donations do we have to give if our customers will use your services? "
A good starting answer from @woodpeck
You are welcome to use our data for your project, but not our servers.
We don't have a schedule of how much money you have to give for a
certain intensity of use, and our servers are run by volunteers and
often on donated hardware, in universities and the like - we can't
"sell" this server capacity to commercial users.
If you just need the map tiles (not routing or geocoding), then you'll
find good instructions about server setup on www.switch2osm.org.
There's also a multitude of commercial providers of OpenStreetMap map
tiles and other services (in case you don't want to run the servers
yourself) on
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Commercial_OSM_Software_and_Services
- these companies typically load our data on their own servers (just
like you would if you follow switch2osm instructions) and then sell
access to these servers.
The only thing we at OSM ask in return for our data is that you provide
correct attribution, i.e. make the users of the map aware that the
content comes from OpenStreetMap and our map data is openly licensed.