Terms of Use

What Mappily is

Mappily shows topographic, satellite and trail maps for hiking, paddling and backcountry use, and lets you draw waypoints, routes and areas of your own into a trip. There are no accounts and nothing to sign up for.

It is a planning and sharing tool that also works in the field. It does not navigate for you, it does not record where you have been, and offline it can only show what it has already downloaded. What it does not do, it does not do deliberately.

The map is not a substitute for your own judgement

Nothing here is guaranteed to be accurate, current or complete. A path drawn on a map may not exist on the ground, a bridge may be gone, and a route the app has drawn along a line on a tile is not a promise that the line can be walked, paddled or climbed.

The figures worked out for you — a distance, an elevation profile, a horizon, a river level — are calculated from published data and from a terrain model, and each carries the errors of whatever it was built from. Water readings are shown as their register published them, which can be hours or days old, and a station can be out of service without saying so.

Mappily is offered as it is, with no warranty of any kind and no liability for what is done with it. Going into the outdoors is your decision and your risk, and carrying what that decision needs — including a map and a compass that do not depend on a battery — is your responsibility.

The maps themselves belong to other people

Almost nothing you see is ours. The imagery comes from OpenStreetMap, OpenTopoMap, Esri, Spain's IGN, Catalonia's ICGC, France's IGN and others, each under its own licence and its own terms, and the water and terrain data come from the public registers that publish them.

Whichever of them you are looking at is named under the map. That credit is part of the licence rather than decoration, which is why it cannot be turned off. Switching a layer on means accepting the terms of whoever serves it, and adding a tile address of your own means saying you have the right to use it.

What you draw is yours

We claim nothing over your trips. They are stored in your own browser, and a copy reaches the server only so that a link you share works on somebody else's device.

A trip link is the key to the trip rather than an address for it: anyone holding it can open it, and anyone holding the edit link can change it. There is no password to lose and no way to call a link back, so pass one on the way you would pass on a key.

Fair use of a free service

Place search, routing and elevation are answered by this server for anyone who asks, with no account and no fee. That is affordable only while the traffic is people looking at maps.

So: no using this site to bulk-download from the tile services behind it, no scraping, and no automated traffic beyond what somebody using the map produces. Requests are rate limited and anything past the limits is refused. Use that makes the service unusable for other people can be blocked.

Free is how it is now rather than a promise about later. Building this and running the servers behind it costs money, and some of what Mappily does may in time be part of a paid version to cover that.

The site itself

The name Mappily, the design of the site and the code behind it are ours, and using the site grants no licence to any of them. They are not free to copy, to rebrand, or to run somewhere else.

That covers the site and not what it displays: the map data belongs to its providers, and what you draw belongs to you.

These terms can change

The app changes and this page changes with it; the date at the top says when it last did. Continuing to use Mappily after a change means the current version is the one that applies. There is no account to send a notice to, so this page is the notice.

Asking about any of this

Questions about these terms, or about anything on this page, can go to privacy [at] mappily.com.