Pric­ing and eval­u­a­tion

Map­board GIS uses a sub­scrip­tion pric­ing model. The base ap­pli­ca­tion is free, but most users will want a Full Ver­sion sub­scrip­tion which costs $29.99 per year (or your lo­cal cur­rency equiv­a­lent), billed through Ap­ple’s App Store.

Lim­i­ta­tions of the free ver­sion

The free ver­sion of the app gives ac­cess to all func­tion­al­ity, but with a lim­i­ta­tion to 50 edit­ing op­er­a­tions per day. On the trial, you can eas­ily test draw­ing fea­tures, adding cus­tom basemaps, con­nect­ing to re­mote servers, and shar­ing your re­sults to GIS soft­ware. Al­though data cre­ation is lim­ited, it’s easy to try out the app and get a sense of whether the work­flow will fit your needs.

Why a sub­scrip­tion?

Our mo­ti­va­tions in re­leas­ing Map­board GIS are to save time for other re­searchers and to model a new re­la­tion­ship be­tween geo­sci­en­tists and their com­put­ing tools. Charg­ing for a sub­scrip­tion will al­low us to build a more smoothly func­tional tool, and our pric­ing com­pares well with the com­pe­ti­tion.

Build­ing iOS soft­ware, keep­ing it up-to-date, and shar­ing it with the com­mu­nity re­quires tons of ef­fort. The life­cy­cle of other tools such as Field­Move sug­gests that free or even sin­gle-pur­chase soft­ware risks aban­don­ment due to un­com­pen­sated ef­fort. Plus, it costs real money to list the ap­pli­ca­tion with Ap­ple and build atop the world-beat­ing Map­box map­ping stack. The Full Ver­sion sub­scrip­tion helps de­fray these costs, and we’re con­fi­dent that this pro­ject saves enough time to be worth the ask­ing price.

De­vel­op­ment and test­ing

We’re ex­cited to work with geo­science re­searchers to im­prove and in­te­grate this map­ping sys­tem. There are sev­eral path­ways to use the app for free if you are col­lab­o­rat­ing with us.

Test­ing

Test­ing pre-re­lease ver­sions of the soft­ware is a great way to help out with de­vel­op­ment. Through Test­Flight you can work with the full ver­sion of the ap­pli­ca­tion at no charge, al­though builds can be less sta­ble and ex­pire af­ter 90 days. We ap­pre­ci­ate feed­back on our pre-re­lease code.

Join the TestFlight beta

De­vel­op­ing in­te­gra­tions

The ap­proach taken by this app and Post­GIS Ge­o­logic Map has the po­ten­tial to greatly sim­plify map­ping work­flows, but build­ing these processes takes time and ef­fort. We’re ex­cited to sup­port the sys­tem’s use in ed­u­ca­tional set­tings and pro­fes­sional map pro­duc­tion. Please get in touch if you’d like to use the app in an or­ga­nized way, and we can make a plan for how to pro­ceed.

Code-level con­tri­bu­tions

If you have fea­ture ideas and are in­ter­ested in work­ing with us to im­ple­ment them, we’re open to giv­ing ac­cess to con­tribute to the app. If this dis­cus­sion arises, we will think about op­tions for open-sourc­ing part or all of the code­base. We’re also will­ing to spin out parts of our sys­tem as open-source li­braries if it will con­tribute con­cretely to other pro­jects.