Pricing
What this would cost, if and when it costs anything.
It is free during the pilot
Nobody has been charged and no price has been offered. Every organisation that joins the pilot does so at no cost, and you would never be billed by surprise: if charging is ever introduced it would be with notice, and you would keep the maps you had already downloaded. What the pilot means.
Everything below this box is written in the future tense on purpose. It describes how a price would be worked out — so that you can judge whether it would ever be affordable — not what anyone is paying.
What you would be buying
Three separable things. Most suppliers sell only the first.
Print-ready maps
A4 at 300 dpi, plus the SVG, for each output you have turned on — reviewed by a person before you can download them. A one-off deliverable: useful the day it lands.
Keeping them right
The monthly cycle: the data is re-read, changes to your routes are shown to you, you preview and accept, and your colours and labels carry over. This is the part that stops a map on a noticeboard quietly becoming wrong.
A public page
Each reviewed map gets a page anyone can view, print and link to, carrying your organisation's name and a form so readers can tell you if something looks off.
The maintenance is the product. A beautiful map that was accurate two years ago is worse than no map, because people trust it. The maps are what gets you started; the monthly cycle is what the money would actually be for.
How a price would be arrived at
Two parts, and no figure quoted before we have looked at your town.
A build fee
Charged once, when your map is first made. It would be quoted after we survey the area and score how hard it is to draw — never before.
An annual fee
Covering the monthly update cycle, the review on each new version, and the public page. Per place, per year — not per map and not per print run.
Why the survey comes first
Towns differ enormously. Before any of the expensive work starts, the system scores the area on how many services run, how tightly they bunch in the centre, and how much of the network ends up hidden underneath other lines. The score comes out green, amber or red, and a red town genuinely costs several times what a green one does.
That score is what a quote would be based on. It is the difference between a price we can show you the reasoning for and a number someone guessed — and it is why we would rather survey first and quote second. See what a red town looks like, and what we do about it.
What would be included, and what would cost extra
Included
- All the standard outputs for your map
- Your own colours, labels and landmarks
- Print-ready A4 at 300 dpi, and the SVG
- The public page for each reviewed map
- Accessibility as standard — a screen-reader-readable service list for every map, route numbers as well as colours, and pages aimed at WCAG 2.2 level AA, the standard councils and schools must meet (what we have done, and what is not fixed)
- The monthly cycle: see the change, preview it, accept it
Costs Extra
- by arrangement The where-to-board plan for a bus station or town centre — the stops at walking scale, and an index of destinations naming the stop to stand at. It can only be drawn where the national stop register names each stop unambiguously, so it is checked for your place before it is offered, and it carries the update obligation more heavily than anything else we make: a plan on a pole that disagrees with the flag beside it is worse than no plan (what it is)
- Larger sheets and bus-stop panel sizes
- A re-issue partway through the year, when a service changes and you cannot wait for the next monthly edition
- Rush builds
Would it be good value?
Against a design agency
An agency's cost is a cartographer's time on your map, once, and on the public record that is not much: about £970 for a market-town schematic, under £2,000 for a county. What follows is the standing bill. Every time a route moves, someone is paid by the hour to redraw it, and the one itemised estimate we have found prices that at £6,600 for two weeks of updating work. The drawing here is generated from the data, so the intention is to price the first map below an agency's and to have the updates covered rather than quoted each time, because the update, not the map, is where the money goes (who else does this, with sources).
The honest version
For a parish council or a bus users' group the alternative is not a cheaper supplier. It is nothing — the agencies sell to transport authorities in programmes of £50,000 and up, not to a town, so no single map showing every operator's buses on one map exists, and residents assemble the picture themselves from two or three websites. For a council the alternative is real and priced, and it sells an edition rather than a map that stays right. Either way this is an easy thing to compare favourably against, and a hard thing to find a budget line for. Which is why the next section exists.
Who normally pays for this
The commonest objection is "we have no budget for maps" — and it is usually wrong. The money tends to sit in a budget nobody thinks of as a mapping budget.
Councils & transport authorities
Bus funding now arrives as the Local Authority Bus Grant — a multi-year formula allocation to 2029, not a competitive bid — and two duties falling due in March 2027 draw on it. Parish and district work is often reachable through S106 or CIL money attached to a development, or straight from the precept.
Hospitals, campuses & schools
Green travel plans and sustainability budgets, and the travel-plan obligations attached to planning permission — which sometimes require public-transport information to be published.
Business & science parks
Tenant service charges and amenity budgets. This sits alongside the cycle racks and the shuttle bus as part of what tenants are already paying for.
Town centres, BIDs & attractions
BID levy budgets earmarked for access and the visitor experience; for attractions, the visitor-marketing budget, since the map is what gets someone there without a car.
Bus operators & community transport
The marketing budget — offset directly against what an external designer would have been paid for the same artwork.
Not sure which is you?
Tell us who you are and what you need and we will say plainly whether we think there is a route to funding it. Ask us.
We do not print
You get the print-ready file; you use your own printer, or a local print shop, or the copier in the office. That is deliberate. Printing through us would add a markup to something you can buy better and cheaper locally, and it would tie the price of a map to the price of paper.
You can reprint at will — it costs you nothing to run off more copies whenever you need them. Keep it as issued, credits included: the map is built from licensed data (OpenStreetMap, BODS) that requires attribution, so please don't alter it or remove the acknowledgements. Full terms of use.
A quote would follow a survey of your area, and during the pilot there would be nothing to pay. Read the FAQ.