The four questions to ask
- Commercial use. May the map appear in a product, a paid report, an ad or a site with ads?
- Export and print. May you save the map as an image or PDF, or print it?
- Offline and caching. May you store tiles, imagery or geocoding results on your own servers or devices?
- Attribution. What credit line must stay visible, and where?
Google Maps
Google separates free consumer products from the paid Google Maps Platform. Embedding a Google map on a website and linking to Google Maps are allowed without permission. Static images of Google Maps may appear in business documents, periodicals and books up to 5,000 copies, but not on consumer goods such as posters or mugs, and the Google attribution must stay visible next to the map.
Google Earth imagery may not be used for commercial or promotional purposes. Paying for Google Maps Platform gives you the right to display maps inside your product online. It does not give you download rights: content may not be pre-fetched, stored or cached beyond what the terms allow, and offline use is prohibited.
Mapbox
Mapbox is built for commercial products. Interactive maps need the Mapbox logo and text attribution. Static and printed maps must be credited like a photo, with “© Mapbox, © OpenStreetMap” near the image. Images made with the Mapbox Studio print export require contacting Mapbox sales before use.
OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap data is licensed under the Open Database License. You may use it commercially, render your own maps and export, print or cache them, as long as you credit “© OpenStreetMap contributors”. If you publish a changed database, it must stay under ODbL. The volunteer-run tile server at tile.openstreetmap.org is not for heavy or commercial traffic, so use a tile provider or host tiles yourself.
Self-hosted tiles
If you need users to download or print maps freely, host your own OSM-based tiles, for example a single PMTiles file on object storage rendered with MapLibre. Then only the OpenStreetMap attribution applies, with no per-request fees and no export restrictions from a vendor.
Satellite imagery
Copernicus Sentinel data and US Landsat data are free and open, including for commercial use, with attribution. Commercial very-high-resolution imagery is licensed per use, and imagery shown inside consumer apps such as Google Earth usually cannot be republished.
Your own drawings and data
Points, lines and shapes you draw yourself are yours, even when drawn over someone else's basemap. Most tools let you export them as KML, GeoJSON or CSV. The restrictions apply to the basemap and imagery under them, not to your own layers.