We use Mapbox's APIs and maps to run most of our service. They have a wide selection of powerful APIs to enable routing, directions, traffic, and many other usage points. Without Mapbox, we would have to either re-survey maps on our own or re-build a large portion of APIs to work on top of open-source maps, like OpenStreetMap. In addition, they have beautiful maps that our users view on our front-end applications that are also really easy to build functionality on top of.
- Great documentation! Most of the services, APIs, and products provided by Mapbox are very easy to implement. Sometimes as little as two lines of code need to be added.
- Great pricing to try out their services - it's very rare to pass their free tier of service in the alpha or beta testing stages.
- Provides some services that aren't provided at any other mapping or geography API/service company, like the Mapbox Navigation SDK.
- Some services, like routing, can be *very* expensive in production. A company can potentially spend thousands of dollars on routing calculations (API calls), and at that point, you should probably consider moving your routing engine/calculations to an on-premise server (self-hosted service).
- There is downtime. I periodically receive notifications of some of Mapbox's services being down. They have never affected us or our users, but I'm not so sure about other companies.
- Limited customization of maps on some platforms. On platforms like iOS and Android, it takes some long experimenting sometimes to get the maps to display and behave in the way your product exactly needs them to.
