Swapping Google Maps for OpenStreetMap

Google Maps is excellent and, at scale, expensive. For a corporate site that mostly needed to show locations and let users pan around, OpenStreetMap with a Leaflet front end covered the requirements at a fraction of the cost.

What actually changed

The visible map swap was the easy part. The real work was in geocoding differences, tile attribution requirements, and re-checking every place we assumed Google-specific behavior.

• Pick a tile provider with terms that fit your traffic.
• Keep attribution visible — it is a licensing requirement, not a suggestion.
• Re-test marker clustering and zoom behavior; defaults differ.