Maple maps

Description

Maple Maps: navigation made for Canada

Maple Maps is a turn-by-turn navigation app built for Canadian roads, by a Canadian, with one job: give Canadians a good map that does not route through American tech companies.

It does the things you expect. Live traffic and closures, speed limits, gas, charging and parking in one tap, opening hours so you know a place is open before you drive there. Then it does a few things nobody else does. Search results carry a maple leaf when a business is Canadian-owned, with a source behind every one of the nearly 600 brands we have verified. Independent shops get a LOCAL badge, and owners can claim their listing for free. The app is bilingual by design, written in English and French from day one rather than translated afterwards.

And it asks nothing of you. No account, no sign-in, no profile. Saved places stay on your phone, and the service runs in a data centre in Montréal. We do not hold identifiable data about anyone, so there is nothing to leak, sell or be asked for. That is the point, not a side effect.

Where we are

The beta is open on iPhone and Android. Nearly 2,300 people have signed up, far more than planned, so invitations go out in waves. Every build so far has been shaped by tester emails: a starting point you choose, results shown on the map, gravel and ferry warnings up front, music that comes back after a voice prompt. Release notes are public at maplemaps.ca so you can see exactly what shipped and why.

Why funding matters

A private, ad-free map is not free to run. Every search, route and speed limit is a metered request to our map data provider, and that bill grows with every driver. We have already cut a lot of waste there and keep optimizing, but the shape does not change: more people means more map. There are also backend, hosting and email costs that scale with a beta that got bigger than expected.

We will not sell user data. We do not have it. We will not run ads, because ads make a worse app and a worse app sends people back to the big guys. That leaves two routes we are exploring with the community: a small subscription, or sponsorship from Canadian-owned companies whose listings would show in a different colour, with the leaf never for sale.

Support now goes directly to keeping the map running for the people already driving with it, and to building the pieces that make Maple Maps stand on its own: a Canadian business database merged into the map, better coverage outside the cities, and getting the app out of beta and into the stores.

If you think Canadians should have a map that keeps their data at home and puts Canadian businesses on it, this is how you help build it.

www.maplemaps.ca · [email protected]