I noticed that HA switched from using Carto (which served the openstreetmap based tiles before, but stopped when they recently switched to requiring paid API keys) to using OpenStreetMap’s official tile service.
While that is indeed a quick solution, it does obv result in most home assistant installations now hammering the OSM infrastructure, which already has to deal with a lot of bots and other increased AI traffic.
As a very long term contributor to #OpenStreetMap , I thank you for your suggestion.
Whilst financial contributions are always nice (and help pay for local servers), there are so many other ways to help #OSM that are fun to do and help other worldwide projects including HA, OHF, and even international humanitarian efforts.
You can add your local knowledge to the open and free map, just like Wikipedia - have a look at the welcome mat and beginners guide:
For Android users, I’d simply suggest installing Street Complete on a phone and go for a walk. The app asks simple questions around the world around you - house numbers, pavement smoothness. Simple, but can help routing for your deliveries, or those with accessibility needs (e.g. can a wheelchair user get past a bollard?) https://streetcomplete.app/
Similar tools exist for other platforms (but I’ve not used them).
If you’re interested in where OSM data came from, and how it was contributed, here’s a blog post from a few years ago:
I’d guess that HA’s client-side use (with local caching) doesn’t hit the vector tile servers half as much as some other COMMERCIAL users who should know better. That is likely why Carto added API keys - to manage their load.
Donating effort and time is obviously appreciated by the OSM Foundation, but running the tile servers costs actual money, and those costs are proportional to usage.
While day-to-day usage of HomeAssistant may not seem to generate a lot of requests, when multiplied by a million HA users the load probably goes up more than you might realize.
I know it’s not a broadly applicable answer, but if a fraction of HA users joined the OSM Foundation as dues-paying members, it might help offset the cost somewhat.