Why we built a free map API for Vietnam

I've been writing apps that need a map for ten years. Every single one ran into the same wall: finding a reliable Vietnam map API is challenging. In Vietnam, the addresses are messy, the place names have diacritics that get mangled, and the global providers — Google Maps, Mapbox — either bill you per request in USD or quietly degrade their data quality south of the equator.

You can usually feel the gap before you can name it. A user types "Hà Nội" and the geocoder returns nothing. A driver opens a route and it sends them down a one-way alley because the OSM tile says it's a normal street. A support ticket says "the map is wrong." You buy a third-party POI dataset to patch it. The bill arrives.

Why free, and why forever

We could turn on Stripe. We've looked at it. The truth is that in Vietnam, charging means VAT registration, electronic invoicing (Hóa đơn điện tử), and the payment-gateway compliance dance — overhead that, at our scale, costs more than the marginal infra we'd save.

So we picked the simpler trade: free, forever. 100 requests/day per account is enough for prototypes, side projects, and a lot of small production apps. You can learn more about our free map API tier. Need more? Email us, tell us what you're building, and we'll raise your limit. Still free.

If we ever change course we'll announce it long before. Existing accounts won't be cut off without notice. That's the deal.

Who this is for

• Vietnamese developers who don't want a US dollar bill every month for a side project.
• Real-estate, logistics, and food-delivery startups who need a sane geocoder for "Ngõ 32 Hào Nam" without paying enterprise rates.
• Engineers building admin-boundary search down to the ward (xã) — we ship the full 11,000+ ward dataset cleaned and reverse-indexed.

What's next

We've got an isochrone API coming, a static map endpoint for README badges, and a distance matrix for dispatch. All free. All open about what they cost us to run.

Sign up at gogoduk.com, ping [email protected] if you want to chat about a use case, and let me know what would actually be useful to ship next.