For developers, self-hosters & small teams done with metered billing
Search for places and turn coordinates into addresses with a privacy-first, Photon-compatible geocoding API hosted in the EU. Add vector maps and connect AI tools through Geo MCP, included in your plan. Start free, scale to 2.5M lookups a month. Every plan is a hard cap: no usage-based billing, no overage charges, no tracking.
More ways to build
Map tiles and Geo MCP are included in your ChibiGeo plan. Use your existing API key, with clear allowances and no extra subscription.
Draw roads, buildings and places with MapLibre or another MVT renderer. Use tiles directly in browser maps, with built-in CORS support and API-key origin restrictions. TileJSON gives your map the source URL, layers, zoom range and attribution. Bring your own map style.
GET /v1/tiles/tiles.json
GET /v1/tiles/{z}/{x}/{y}.mvt1,000 tiles/day free. Up to 1M tiles/month on Scale. Tile usage is separate from geocoding; TileJSON uses no tile quota.
Build a map with MapLibre →Connect Codex, Claude Code or Cursor to ChibiGeo. Let your assistant search for a place or turn coordinates into an address using real geocoding results.
https://app.chibigeo.com/mcp
Tools: search_places · reverse_geocodeEach lookup uses your geocoding allowance and rate limits. Your API key restrictions and plan conditions still apply.
Connect your AI assistant →Step 1 — The Math
Same OpenStreetMap data underneath. Wildly different invoices. Here's what 250,000 geocoding requests a month actually costs:
List price ~$5 per 1,000 calls. Volume discounts exist — after the sales call.
Beefy server, ~200 GB index, updates, monitoring. “Free” is the most expensive plan.
Flat. Capped. No overage, ever.
That's €13,000+ a year back in your pocket — for the same answer to "what's at these coordinates?"
Powered by open-source Photon & OpenStreetMap
Step 2 — Why This Keeps Happening
The big providers built their pricing for corporations with procurement departments. Then they pointed it at you.
Your app gets featured, a cron loop runs hot, a scraper finds your endpoint. With metered APIs, your best day becomes your most expensive one.
You want "where did I run this morning?". They quote SKUs, sessions, tiers — and a sales call just to find out the price.
For ad-tech giants, the real product is knowing where your users are. Every request you send feeds the machine.
Step 3 — How It Works
Sign up and get your API key in minutes. No credit card, no sales call, no onboarding webinar.
100% Photon-compatible API. Dawarich, any Photon client, your own code — point it at ChibiGeo and it just works.
Hard monthly cap with email warnings before you hit it. The worst thing that can happen is a heads-up email. Never an invoice.
curl 'https://app.chibigeo.com/v1/photon/reverse?lat=52.5162&lon=13.3778' \
--header 'X-Api-Key: YOUR_KEY'{
"type": "FeatureCollection",
"features": [
{
"type": "Feature",
"properties": {
"osm_type": "W",
"osm_id": 518071791,
"osm_key": "tourism",
"osm_value": "attraction",
"name": "Brandenburger Tor",
"housenumber": "1",
"street": "Pariser Platz",
"district": "Mitte",
"city": "Berlin",
"postcode": "10117",
"country": "Deutschland",
"countrycode": "DE"
},
"geometry": {
"type": "Point",
"coordinates": [
13.3777034,
52.5162699
]
}
}
]
}Who It's For
Dawarich, OwnTracks, Home Assistant — give your self-hosted stack real place names without feeding Big Maps.
Turn raw GPS tracks into "morning run through Tiergarten" instead of a wall of coordinates.
Your most sensitive data is where you sleep every night. Keep it in the EU, untracked, unsold.
Add geocoding without a procurement process. One key, one URL, fixed cost you can actually budget.
Know your geocoding cost for the entire year before you write a single line of code.
Outgrow 2.5M requests? Custom volume plans exist — no forced enterprise migration.
The Plans
Geocoding, map tiles and Geo MCP in one plan. Geocoding and tiles have separate allowances. Hard caps, no usage-based billing or overage charges.
2,500 geocoding requests / dayGeocoding: 1 req/s sustained
Burst up to 3 requests
1,000 map tiles / dayTiles: 64 req/s per key
Geo MCP: uses your geocoding allowance & rates
For tinkering and trying it out.
500,000 geocoding requests / monthGeocoding: 10 req/s sustained
Burst up to 20 requests
100,000 map tiles / monthTiles: 80 req/s per key
Geo MCP: uses your geocoding allowance & rates
The default for indie devs and small apps.
2,500,000 geocoding requests / monthGeocoding: 25 req/s sustained
Burst up to 50 requests
1,000,000 map tiles / monthTiles: 200 req/s per key
Geo MCP: uses your geocoding allowance & rates
For serious, high-volume workloads.
500,000 geocoding requests / monthGeocoding: 5 req/s sustained
Burst up to 10 requests
100,000 map tiles / monthTiles: 64 req/s per key
Geo MCP: uses your geocoding allowance & rates
Our thank-you to Dawarich users.
No check at checkout — on your honor. This plan only serves geocoding requests sent from the Dawarich, reitti & GeoPulse apps. Need general-purpose API access? Pick Builder.
Geocoding rates and bursts apply per API key. Parallel requests share a token bucket that refills at your plan's rate, up to its burst capacity. Geo MCP uses this same quota and bucket; it has no separate lookup allowance. Rate limits and retry guidance →
Tile rates apply per key in one-second windows. Only successful MVT tile responses consume tile allowance; TileJSON metadata is free of tile usage. Hobby allowances reset daily at 00:00 UTC; paid allowances reset monthly on your billing anniversary. Self-Hoster app restrictions apply to all included access. Tile allowances and integration guide →
The "Simplest Setup Ever" Guarantee: every paid plan comes with a 30-day, one-email, no-questions refund — and a live status page at app.chibigeo.com/v1/photon/status. Cancel anytime.
The Obvious Question
There isn't one. Here's why the price can be this fair:
Photon + OpenStreetMap. No data-licensing rent baked into your bill — the community built the map, we run the infrastructure.
We know exactly what your requests cost us, so you know exactly what they cost you. No one subsidizes anyone.
No VC growth targets, no sales team, no ad budget. A free tier to try it, then you pay for the service. That is the entire business model.
ZeitFlow UG, Berlin. Hosted in the EU. GDPR is not a marketing badge for us — it is the law we live under.