Once everyone uses OSM, won't it be prohibitively expensive for a non-profit to serve it?
Yes. The problem is that Google has started charging now as well- at least, once you hit a certain threshold. They might have a deal available for non-profits, I'm not sure. It's certainly something I'd hope MapBox are working on, because non-profit mapping seems like a large (and worthwhile area).
No doubt, the bandwidth costs are expensive, though. I made my own custom map tiles (you can see a demo of them in use at http://www.taxono.my) and put them behind an Amazon CloudFront server, which makes it about as cheap as possible. But still, if my traffic gets huge, it could be an issue.
Yes. The problem is that Google has started charging now as well- at least, once you hit a certain threshold. They might have a deal available for non-profits, I'm not sure. It's certainly something I'd hope MapBox are working on, because non-profit mapping seems like a large (and worthwhile area).
No doubt, the bandwidth costs are expensive, though. I made my own custom map tiles (you can see a demo of them in use at http://www.taxono.my) and put them behind an Amazon CloudFront server, which makes it about as cheap as possible. But still, if my traffic gets huge, it could be an issue.