Reliability and privacy
What happens when something breaks
Every vendor page tells you about uptime. Almost none tell you what they do not cover. This page does both, because the second list is the one that costs you money at the wrong moment.
What we commit to
Cached tiles survive our outages
Tiles are cached at the Cloudflare location nearest your visitor for 24 hours. If our Worker or our storage has a bad minute, the tiles your visitors are already looking at keep being served from the edge.
A licence outage does not darken your map
If the licence store is unreachable, domains we have recently served keep working from the Worker's last known answer. A storage hiccup on our side is not your customer's blank screen.
One bad record cannot take you down
A malformed entry in the licence store used to return a 500 for that domain, which meant a blank map. It now degrades to a plain denial and the service stays up. We found this by testing rather than by an incident, and we wrote a test so it cannot come back.
Data refresh without downtime
The monthly OpenStreetMap refresh writes a new archive and swaps it in. Nothing is taken offline, and your custom style follows the new data automatically because it is generated, not hand-edited.
What we do not promise yet
We are a four person engineering team running this alongside our agency work. Here is what that honestly means today.
No public status page
We do not yet publish a live status page or an incident history. If something is wrong, email us and a human will answer. We would rather say this than point you at a green dashboard nobody updates.
No financially backed SLA below Enterprise
Starter, Growth and Scale are best-effort plans on top of Cloudflare's global network. A written SLA with response times and remedies is part of the Enterprise agreement, not the self-serve plans.
Support is email, in business hours
We answer within one business day, usually faster. There is no 24/7 phone line. Enterprise customers get a priority channel and a named contact.
The licence check is a domain check
It stops a third party from pasting your style URL into their site. It is not a cryptographic guarantee, and a determined actor running a server-side proxy can forge the headers. That is true of every client-side map service, ours included.
What the tile endpoint knows about your visitors
Your visitors load tiles directly from our edge, so it is fair to ask what we see. The short answer: the domain, and nothing that identifies a person.
What we record
- The domain the map was shown on
- How we identified it: request origin, referrer, or our embed
- Country and Cloudflare data centre code
- Whether the request was allowed or denied
What we do not record
- No cookies. The tile endpoint sets none, and reads none
- No visitor identifier, no fingerprint, no cross-site profile
- No IP address in our analytics
- No coordinates: we never store where your visitors looked
Your map data never reaches us
Markers, routes, polygons and heatmaps are drawn by your own code in your visitor's browser, on top of our basemap. Your data is never uploaded to us and never passes through our servers. There is nothing for us to leak.
Cloudflare, as the network serving the tiles, processes the connection like any CDN and sees the IP address at the transport layer. That is unavoidable for anything served over the internet, and it is the same for any map provider.
Failure modes, in plain language
Not a risk register for lawyers. This is what actually happens to your map in each case.
Our Worker is deploying
Nothing visible. Deploys are atomic and cached tiles keep serving.
Our licence store is unreachable
Recently served domains keep working from the last known answer. A brand new domain would be denied until it recovers.
A tile is missing at high zoom
That tile renders empty. The rest of the map is unaffected. Usually means the zoom is beyond level 15.
You exceed your plan's map loads
We email you. We do not cut the map off mid month, and we do not auto-charge overage without telling you.
Your licence is suspended for non payment
The map stops rendering and the browser console shows a 403 with a link to renew. We warn you first.
Cloudflare has a regional incident
The map degrades for visitors in that region, like most of the web that day. We have no control over this and neither does any provider on the same network.
Licence and attribution
The map data comes from OpenStreetMap and is licensed under ODbL. Attribution is a legal requirement, not a branding choice: the credit in the corner of the map stays visible and we do not offer a way to remove it. Your commercial licence with us covers the service, the styles and the infrastructure. It does not, and cannot, relicense the underlying open data.
Questions we did not answer here?
Ask them before you buy, not after. If you need a written SLA, a data processing agreement or tiles inside your own Cloudflare account, that conversation is the Enterprise plan.