Let's talk about money

Everything is still so new that I cannot honestly tell you what Maple Maps costs per active user. The numbers move every day. But I can tell you why it costs anything at all, what I will not do about it, and the two ways I can see to cover it. Then I would like to hear from you.

Why we are doing this

Maple Maps is both politically and privacy motivated. We want an app that sidesteps the big American tech companies. That gives us some freedom from the turmoil south of the border; in a small way it makes a statement about how Canadians feel at the moment; and as a direct result it keeps our data out of the hands of those same companies.

Privacy matters enough to us that the app has no accounts. There is nothing to sign in to, and so there is no identifiable data about any user for us to hold, leak, or be asked for. That is not an accident of being early. It is the point.

What it costs

None of this is free to run. There were start-up costs to set up the backend services. There is an email provider to manage all the interest coming in, which is a much bigger job at 1,600 sign-ups than it was at a hundred. And the biggest line item by far is the map itself: every search, route and speed limit is a metered request to TomTom, and that bill scales with every one of you. We have already cut a lot of waste there and we keep optimizing, but the shape of it does not change. More people means more map.

What we will not do

We have no designs on, and no interest in, ever selling user data. It is a non-starter; we do not even have the data to sell, and that is by design.

We also really do not want ads in the service. Ads lead to a bad experience, a bad experience leads people to fade, and they go back to the big guys they are used to. That defeats the reason Maple Maps exists.

Two options

A subscription. A small monthly fee to use the service. The pitch is simple: you are paying to keep your data out of the hands of American companies, to keep your map and your searches anonymous, and to support a navigation app whose purpose is to promote Canadian businesses and institutions.

Sponsorship from Canadian companies. We already mark hundreds of businesses as fully Canadian in ownership. Sponsors could have their listings show up in a different colour when you search, and nothing else would change; the leaf still means what it means, and a sponsor could not buy one.

The second option has real technical hurdles. For it to be fair, a broad search like "restaurant" or "coffee" has to return accurate, complete results every time, and the categories have to be spot on. A lot of that depends on the map data we get from TomTom, which is good in cities and patchy in the country. There are ways around it, including building our own database of Canadian businesses and merging it into the map, but that is a whole different project.

What I would like from you

If you have read this far, I would love your thoughts. Which of these would you accept? Is there a third way I am not seeing? What would a small monthly fee have to be, and what would it have to include, for you to keep using Maple Maps over the free app you already have?

Reply to any email from us, or write to hello@maplemaps.ca. Next week, once the app has been in your hands for a full week, there will be a short anonymous survey so everyone has a simple way to weigh in. I will share what I hear back.

Mathieu