What is squidmaps?

Digital maps are a unique mix of data and design. They make pictures of places that tell stories, make distance and proximity clear, show where a business is, record where you’ve been, and do a million other things. Maps are human: they resonate with everyone. squidmaps is a place where anyone can make maps, share them and keep them, with ease.

A map, not an engineering project

Making a web map is easier than it has ever been, but it’s still an engineering project.

Web mapping libraries draw circles, lines and polygons with ease. The moment you want symbols, icons or labels, you need a spritesheet and font glyphs. Styles are a language of their own, with expressions for every color and size. The map’s title, its legend and anything else laid over it are built outside the map, in custom code, and so are interactions like tooltips and popups. Then there are tilesets to juggle.

All of it has to live somewhere, and be fit into your site or app. Even the simplest web map has to be built and deployed, maybe to GitHub Pages, which means another repository to maintain and more packages to keep up to date. And every change is a code change: moving a point means working out its new coordinates and pushing a commit.

squidmaps takes all of that away. Draw or import your places, style them, and publish. Your map gets a link of its own that you can send to anyone, or embed in your blog or website, with nothing to host or maintain. Moving a point means dragging it.

Opinions, so you don’t need code

squidmaps has opinions about what a map can do, and they’re what keep it simple. Instead of a styling language, there’s a versatile handful of styles to pick from: colors, symbols, icons, dashes, fills and labels. Instead of custom code, the title panel, legend, tooltips and popups are built in.

Within those opinions there’s a lot of room, especially for simpler maps. squidmaps isn’t for building apps. It’s for presenting spatial data, and making it look the way you want.

Who it’s for

Anyone with places to show: a business owner marking their locations, a community group mapping its neighborhood, a writer illustrating a story, or someone sharing their favorite spots. You don’t need to know anything about GIS or code to make a great map.

squidmaps isn’t a developer tool, but it makes a good last mile for spatial developers and GIS professionals. Bring in the results of a project or analysis as GeoJSON, a shapefile and more, or write the map yourself in the open map spec, and squidmaps turns your data into a polished map you can share.

How it works

1. Add your places. Drawing tools let you mark up the basemap with the things you care about: points, lines, areas and text. Or bring in data you already have, like a GeoJSON file, a spreadsheet or a shapefile.
2. Make it yours. Choose colors, symbols and sizes, give each place a name, a description and photos, and add a legend so your symbols read at a glance.
3. Publish and share. Your map goes live at its own link, like squidmaps.io/you/your-map, with a title panel that tells its story. Send the link, or embed the map in a page. Keep editing privately and publish again whenever you’re ready.

A picture you can explore

We think of a map mostly as a picture, made to be read. Because it lives on the web, people can also zoom in and explore it. For most maps, a light touch of interactivity is all that’s needed:

• tooltips as you hover over a place
• cards or a side panel with a place’s story when you click it
• directions to a point
• a description of the whole map, and a legend

squidmaps keeps interactivity to these, and puts its effort into making your map look the way you want: easy controls for colors, symbols, sizes and labels.

What people make with it

• The result of an analysis done elsewhere: map what you found in a spreadsheet, a notebook or a GIS project, and share it.
• Personal maps: food tours, bar crawls, historic sites, a trip, the places you love.
• Local guides: points of interest for hotel guests or short-term rental visitors.
• Sales territories, drawn quickly and shared with a team.
• Planning maps: new housing, zoning changes, a study area for a project.

The whole map in one document

squidmaps maps are built on an opinionated but flexible map spec: an open JSON format that describes a whole map in one document. Its data, styles, popups, legend, basemap and view are all in one place. A web map is usually spread across several: the data in GeoJSON, its look in a separate style file, and its legend and interactions in code.

In one document, a map is easy to keep, export and share, and easy to write, whether in squidmaps, by hand, with a script or by an AI assistant. Each feature carries its own style, so maps are also composable: features from one map can join another and keep their look.

Your data, your way

Draw your data in squidmaps, import it from almost anywhere, or write it yourself. It’s GeoJSON all the way down. Data goes in, and data comes out: you can always export a map, or just its features as GeoJSON, to use somewhere else.

Simple infrastructure

Rendering maps is complex enough. squidmaps is designed for GeoJSON-sized data, like hundreds or thousands of places, not millions, so storing and processing maps stays inexpensive and manageable.

When you publish, your map is saved as a static file rather than served from a database, so it costs the same to host whether it gets a hundred views or a million.

squidmaps is built on the same open source software that industry leaders use, like MapLibre for drawing maps and Protomaps for basemaps from OpenStreetMap. See Attribution for everything squidmaps is built on.

Bring your own AI

squidmaps isn’t built around AI, but AI assistants can be really good at making and styling maps, and the map spec gives them everything they need to speak squidmaps’ language. Ask the assistant you already use for a map, and open it in squidmaps to keep editing.

Keeping AI out of the map editor itself also helps keep squidmaps’ costs, and yours, down.

Maps and mapmakers

Your profile is your collection of maps: the ones you’ve made, managed in one place. Find other people making maps in your area, or about the things you’re interested in, and favorite the maps you like.

What squidmaps isn’t

squidmaps does one thing: simple, beautiful maps you can share. So it isn’t:

• GIS software. It doesn’t do spatial analysis, projections or geoprocessing. Do that in a GIS, and present the result in squidmaps.
• A data analysis tool. Bring your findings, not your raw data.
• A dashboard builder. Maps don’t connect to live data or update on their own.
• A mapping app builder. There’s no SDK or API for building your own mapping app on squidmaps.
• Map infrastructure. If you need your own tilesets, very large datasets or a cloud data warehouse, other tools are a better fit.

Built to last

squidmaps is built by a solo founder, as a tool for the mapping community. The goal is a platform that lasts, and a community built around a shared love of building maps.

That starts with a large free tier: making, publishing and sharing maps is free. Subscriptions sustain it, for people who need more: private maps, more maps and more data, and other power-user features like API access. And because squidmaps are inexpensive to store and serve, the free tier can stay generous.

Where to go next