> What I find interesting to see, and I think it's not just me who can see this - that basically every mention of CoMaps and why it is good and Organic is bad is it not only seems to be mostly written not by a regular users, but by people who contribute to CoMaps (!) - they all fail to show why exactly anybody should migrate from established app with authors who have years of experience of making Maps.Me and OM - to a basically a no-name (based on downloads) clone who is made by... "community"? We don't even know who that is, original developers and people with experience are not involved.
I don't think you read enough, I saw plenty of real problems with Organic maps described.
Affiliate links being included in the app, despite community objections? The lead dev using donations to pay for holidays? Those are a couple that come to mind.
If the donation is framed as a single developer benefitting it should be fine, but at least when I was donating that was framed as donations to the project which suggests something else.
I'm fine with this use, rewarding a developer, but neither was this transparent nor was it fair for all others working on the project (and supposedly getting cost claims refused).
Guys in OM core dev team paying for hosting, app accounts, legal questions, etc(AFAIK, they subsidize all that from their own money because donations are not enough).
On top of that, they contribute years of man-hours for free to the project. I believe it is completely fair for hard-working dev to use donated money to have some rest.
Imo, consumers of all that good are too spoiled to also require strict discipline or transparency or even hating original authors(as seen on HN).
Hosting etc. expenses are a minor fraction compared to OM's donations inflow. And its enough to hire devs, the first dev was hired more than two years ago, but they have been hiding this fact to look more poor and attract more donations.
Even long-term active contributors have been denied even totals information about donations and got to know about first hire by chance about a year since the fact.
Because we have similar costs in CoMaps, e.g. the most expensive part is the map generation server and both OM and CoMaps rent the same model from the same provider and its less than 250 eur/month.
And according to https://ariregister.rik.ee/eng/company/16225385/Organic-Maps... in 2025 they got ~120k eur and this figure likely doesn't include all the donation sources (in addition to the main Stripe channel they also have OpenCollective, LiberaPay, crypto...)
That's fair, however 120k is peanuts for company of developers. I still think it is fair to use that money at dev's disposal.
I got map generator concerns which is totally valid - but that OM trashtalking for things that was never stated(i.e. purpose of donations) is just wrong - even if you like CoMaps, why not be grateful for all awesome work done by OM team which is the foundation of CoMaps?
Because he can estimate based on typical hosting costs for similar websites, on one hand, and a lower-bound estimate of the number and amount of donations, on the other.
I don't think you read enough, I saw plenty of real problems with Organic maps described.