While we do get data from OSM, we run our own tile server called
Kartotherian, mainly for the following reasons:
- OSM's infrastructure is fragile and has cache challenges
- Their datacenter is in London, which means latency becomes an issue
- OSM's rendering stack can't scale horizontally well enough to be sure they could handle our load
- Their map style is not mobile friendly
- We require multilingual and vector tiles, which their stack can't do (currently)
- We wanted to provide nicer map styling in general
Hope that helps!