Skip to main content

For developers, self-hosters & small teams done with metered billing

250k lookups a month. €29 flat. No bill that needs a spreadsheet.

ChibiGeo turns coordinates into places — a privacy-first, Photon-compatible geocoding API hosted in the EU. Start free, scale to 1.5M lookups a month. Every plan is a hard cap: no metering, no overage charges, no tracking.

  • ⚡ Photon drop-in — swap one URL
  • 🇪🇺 Made & hosted in Europe
  • 🛡️ GDPR — your data isn't the product

Step 1 — The Math

Let's do the math your provider hopes you'll skip.

Same OpenStreetMap data underneath. Wildly different invoices. Here's what 250,000 geocoding requests a month actually costs:

Google Maps Geocoding API
~€1,150/month

List price ~$5 per 1,000 calls. Volume discounts exist — after the sales call.

DIY self-hosted Photon
~€60/month + your weekends

Beefy server, ~200 GB index, updates, monitoring. “Free” is the most expensive plan.

ChibiGeo Builder
€29/month

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

Metered geocoding is a tax on your success.

The big providers built their pricing for corporations with procurement departments. Then they pointed it at you.

💸

The Surprise Bill

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.

🧾

Enterprise Pricing for Human Problems

You want "where did I run this morning?". They quote SKUs, sessions, tiers — and a sales call just to find out the price.

🕵️

You Pay Twice: Money and Data

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

Live in 5 minutes. It's literally one URL.

01

Get your key

Sign up and get your API key in minutes. No credit card, no sales call, no onboarding webinar.

02

Swap one URL

100% Photon-compatible API. Dawarich, any Photon client, your own code — point it at ChibiGeo and it just works.

03

Ship and forget

Hard monthly cap with email warnings before you hit it. The worst thing that can happen is a heads-up email. Never an invoice.

You send coordinates…
curl 'https://app.chibigeo.com/v1/photon/reverse?lat=52.5162&lon=13.3778' \
  --header 'X-Api-Key: YOUR_KEY'
…you get a place back.
{
  "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

Built for people, not procurement departments.

🏃 For Individuals & Self-Hosters

Location history & journaling

Dawarich, OwnTracks, Home Assistant — give your self-hosted stack real place names without feeding Big Maps.

Running, riding, roaming

Turn raw GPS tracks into "morning run through Tiergarten" instead of a wall of coordinates.

Privacy that survives audits

Your most sensitive data is where you sleep every night. Keep it in the EU, untracked, unsold.

🛠️ For Builders & Small Teams

Side projects & MVPs

Add geocoding without a procurement process. One key, one URL, fixed cost you can actually budget.

Apps with predictable bills

Know your geocoding cost for the entire year before you write a single line of code.

Scale when you mean it

Outgrow 1.5M requests? Custom volume plans exist — no forced enterprise migration.

The Plans

Flat plans. Hard caps. No surprise bills.

Start free, scale when you mean it. Every plan is a hard cap — no metering, no overage charges, no bill that needs its own spreadsheet.

Hobby

€0forever

 

2,500 requests / day

For tinkering and trying it out.

  • Forward, reverse & lookup geocoding
  • Photon drop-in API — swap one URL
  • EU-hosted, GDPR, zero tracking
  • Community support
Start free
Most popular

Builder

€29/month
or €290/yr — 2 months free

250,000 requests / month

The default for indie devs and small apps.

  • Everything in Hobby
  • Hard cap + email warnings — no overage, ever
  • 30-day money-back guarantee
  • Email support
Subscribe

Scale

€99/month
or €990/yr — 2 months free

1,500,000 requests / month

For serious, high-volume workloads.

  • Everything in Builder
  • Early access to new endpoints & features
  • Higher rate limits
Subscribe
Dawarich users

Self-Hoster

€9.99/month
or €99/yr — 2 months free

500,000 requests / month

Our thank-you to Dawarich users.

  • Everything in Builder, at member pricing
  • 2× the Builder cap — 500k / month
  • 100,000 bonus requests that never expire
  • Early access to new endpoints & features
  • For requests from the Dawarich, reitti & GeoPulse apps only
Subscribe

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.

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.

Beyond 1.5M requests a month? Custom volume, SLAs and on-premise options — no procurement maze. Get in touch →

The Obvious Question

"€29 a month? What's the catch?"

There isn't one. Here's why the price can be this fair:

🌐

Open source under the hood

Photon + OpenStreetMap. No data-licensing rent baked into your bill — the community built the map, we run the infrastructure.

🧮

Hard caps = predictable costs

We know exactly what your requests cost us, so you know exactly what they cost you. No one subsidizes anyone.

🙅

No growth-at-all-costs games

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.

🔒

Your data isn't resold

ZeitFlow UG, Berlin. Hosted in the EU. GDPR is not a marketing badge for us — it is the law we live under.