Map data and attribution

StreetShape draws on maps we do not own. Here is who made them, what their licences ask for, and what that means for what you export.

Last updated 30 August 2026

This document is a draft

It was written against how StreetShape actually works, and every factual claim in it is checkable against the code. What it does not yet have is the company details, the governing law and the retention periods a human has to decide, or a review by a lawyer. Those gaps are marked in the text rather than filled with a guess.

31 outstanding items— show

legal entity name
country of incorporation
company registration number
VAT number
registered office address
EU representative, if the entity sits outside the EU
data protection officer, if one is required
supervisory authority
supervisory authority website
governing law and jurisdiction
ADR body to signpost, if the jurisdiction requires one
minimum age — GDPR Art. 8 allows 13 to 16 by member state
refund position, beyond the statutory withdrawal right
liability cap
voluntary refund window — the draft recommends 30 days
window for refunding a renewal somebody meant to cancel — the draft recommends 14 days
acknowledgement time for a vulnerability report — the draft recommends 2 working days
coordinated disclosure window — the draft recommends 90 days
notice period before a new sub-processor starts, for accounts with a DPA — the draft recommends 30 days
canonical domain — the code uses streetshape.app, the site publishes streetshape.io
Whether classroom use is supported — the education material invites it, which makes under-16 users foreseeable and decides the minimum age above.
The statutory retention period for accounting records in the country of incorporation.
Retention windows for municipality demo requests, the email log, and stored Paddle webhook payloads.
Whether Paddle's checkout captures the Art. 16(m) consent and acknowledgement the Terms rely on for digital content supplied immediately.
The region each processor runs in, and the transfer mechanism relied on for each.
Review of all nine documents by a lawyer in the jurisdiction of incorporation.
Whether a data processing agreement is actually executed with each provider on the sub-processor list, and whether a StreetShape DPA template exists for a municipality or university to sign.
Which imagery and elevation providers sit behind MapTiler's satellite and terrain styles, read from the styles themselves rather than written from memory.
Whether MapTiler's agreement permits printing and republishing satellite imagery, which is a different grant from viewing it on screen.
Whether the Digital Services Act treats StreetShape as a hosting service or an online platform — public proposal boards and consultations point at the second, which carries notice-and-action, statement-of-reasons and appeal duties.
Whether access to production data is logged, and whether a backup restore has ever actually been run.

1. The short version

Your design is yours. The map underneath is theirs.

The street data comes from OpenStreetMap, made by hundreds of thousands of volunteers. The tiles are served by MapTiler. Address search runs on OpenStreetMap data too. We are required to credit all of them, and we are glad to.

Everything you draw — the roads, the crossings, the trees, the markings — is your own geometry. Nothing on this page limits what you do with it.

2. What is on your screen

Four basemaps, each a style served by MapTiler. The style identifier is included so anyone checking our account can look up exactly what we use.

The basemaps and where each one comes from
Layer	Source	Licence
Streets (MapTiler streets-v2)	MapTiler, from OpenStreetMap data	MapTiler's terms · ODbL
Light (MapTiler dataviz-light)	MapTiler, from OpenStreetMap data	MapTiler's terms · ODbL
Satellite (MapTiler hybrid)	[the imagery provider behind MapTiler's hybrid style, read from the style's own attribution]	MapTiler's terms, and the imagery provider's own
Terrain (MapTiler outdoor-v2)	MapTiler, from OpenStreetMap data	MapTiler's terms · ODbL

And everything else drawn from somebody else’s data:

Other third-party data in the product
Layer	Source	Licence
Terrain elevation, under the Terrain basemap	[the elevation provider behind MapTiler's outdoor style, read from the style's own attribution]	MapTiler's terms, and the provider's own
Building footprints	OpenStreetMap contributors	ODbL
Address and place search	Photon (Komoot), with Nominatim (OpenStreetMap Foundation) behind it	ODbL

Both tables are generated from the basemap definitions the editor actually loads, so a basemap cannot be added to the product without appearing here.

3. OpenStreetMap

Most of what you see is OpenStreetMap data.

The ODbL means the data is free to use and share with attribution, and that a database derived from it has to be shared on the same terms.

What that means for you

An image you export is a produced work, not a derived database. You can use it freely, including commercially, as long as the attribution stays on it. It does not put your own design under the ODbL.

What it means for us

StreetShape does not extract or redistribute OpenStreetMap data as data. A plan is geometry you drew on top of the map, not geometry taken out of it — which is the reason we can tell you your designs are your own.

That analysis holds because nothing in the product imports OpenStreetMap geometry into a plan. If anything ever does — snapping to a real road centreline, pulling in an existing junction — share-alike may attach to what the user gets back, and this section has to be rewritten before that feature ships rather than after.

4. Your exports

Every image exported from StreetShape carries the credit its sources require. Do not remove it. It is a condition of the licences above, and stripping it is a breach by you as well as a problem for us.

Depending on the basemap you exported, that credit reads:

Drawn into the image by the export itself, on every export and every plan, with no switch to turn it off. A licence term that asks the user to do something the product does not do for them is a term that gets broken.

Beyond keeping the credit, do what you like with the picture: publish it, print it, sell it, put it in a report, put it on a poster, put it in a consultation response.

Export with the basemap hidden and none of this applies. What you drew is entirely yours.

5. Satellite imagery is different

The right to look at aerial imagery on a screen and the right to print or republish it are not the same right, and the second is the more restricted one. Imagery also comes through a chain of providers rather than from MapTiler alone, so the required credit is specific rather than generic.

If you are producing something for print, for a publication, or for anything commercial, read MapTiler’s terms for the imagery, or export on one of the drawn basemaps instead, where the position is straightforwardly the ODbL.

The imagery and elevation providers are marked as unresolved above deliberately. They have to be read out of the styles’ own attribution rather than written from memory: a confident but wrong credit on an attribution page is worse than a visible gap, because it looks like the obligation was discharged.

6. Address search

When you type a place into the search field, that text is sent to a geocoder to be turned into coordinates. We use Photon, run by Komoot in Germany, with the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s Nominatim behind it. Both are in the EU and both are built on OpenStreetMap data.

The request is made by our server rather than by your browser, so your IP address is not sent to either of them. What is sent is the text you typed.

Going through our own server is what makes the caching, the rate limit and the single identifying User-Agent possible — all three are things the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s usage policy asks for and none of them can be done from a browser.

7. Contributing back

OpenStreetMap is made by people. If your street is wrong on the map, you can fix it at openstreetmap.org and everybody gets the correction, including us.

8. Software

StreetShape is built on open-source software. Among the pieces doing the most work:

MapLibre GL JS — BSD-3-Clause
Next.js — MIT
React — MIT
Tailwind CSS — MIT

That is not the complete list, and this page does not pretend to be one. A generated inventory of every dependency and its licence is the right answer and is not built yet.

9. Getting a credit wrong

If you believe we have credited something incorrectly, or missed a credit entirely, tell us at hello@streetshape.io and we will fix it quickly. This page is an obligation rather than a courtesy, and an error on it is a bug.

What you may do with what you draw is in the terms. What reaches the map providers about you is in the privacy policy and on the sub-processors page.