For too long, developers and businesses have been hindered by the high-cost mapping APIs. Mapfirst disrupts this by turning the map from a cost-heavy utility into a monetisable, AI-driven discovery engine that works across MapLibre, Google, and Mapbox.

Imagine you’ve built a thriving travel discovery platform. As your traffic grows, so does your Google Maps API bill. You’re essentially being punished for your success, paying for every map load while the map remains a "dumb" visual background. This is the Mapping Tax.

Standard industry data shows that high-volume commercial sites can face thousands of dollars in monthly mapping costs. While Google Maps and Mapbox are industry standards, their pricing models are often built around usage volume, not value creation.

This is why we built Mapfirst which changes the math.

Mapfirst is a powerful easy to use SDK providing intelligent property search with AI-powered filters. Instead of a simple static display, Mapfirst offers your users a sophisticated application layer that identifies user intent.

Here are the key value drivers:

• Platform Independence: You can choose the open-source MapLibre GL JS (free) or switch to commercial giants like Google Maps or Mapbox with minimal code changes.

• Active Discovery: It transforms the map into a discovery engine for hotels, restaurants, and attractions.

• From Cost to Revenue: By moving your infrastructure to a system that supports monetisation, the map becomes an asset rather than an overhead.

With Mapfirst developers no longer need to be locked into one vendor. Mapfirst’s Unified API and React hooks provide a single point of truth for integration across all major map platforms.

The issue is real, many startups launch using Mapbox because of its beautiful styles. Six months later, they need to cut costs. Normally, switching to MapLibre would require a total refactor. With Mapfirst, they simply swap the adapter using the useMapFirst hook and the attachMapLibre method.

The Mapfirst SDK is built with a monorepo structure containing @mapfirst.ai/core (the engine) and @mapfirst.ai/react (the UI layer).

Mapfirst handles the heavy lifting of state management, including:

• Location Initialization: Setting initialLocationData like city, country, and currency—crucial for loading correct pricing.

• State Management: Tracking properties, search status, and map bounds automatically.

• Custom Data: Beyond built-in search, you can plot your own custom map pointers, allowing you to blend your proprietary data with global property results.

Mapfirst is TypeScript-ready, ensuring full type safety and a superior developer experience (DX).

So as you can see it’s really a no-brainer choice for businesses to start using Mapfirst to not only give users the best map experience but also to increase revenue from their maps rather than seeing maps as a loss-making part of their business.

We created Mapfirst to be a revenue stream as well as a no-comprise way to keep the functionality of a map for users to use and enjoy.

In the next part of this series we look at the all important user experience and how Mapfirst brings the best industry standards to users.