Why is Mapito paid for?
In short
- Writing costs you nothing. You can create a draft freely and decide later whether or not to publish it.
- You pay once: when you publish your story.
- €1 per 1 GB tier of media kept, each started tier being due.
- Your first story is free, up to 1 GB.
- No subscription, no ads, no information resold. Your stories and your data are not a product: they stay yours, hosted in Europe.
A travel story is mostly photos and videos. They have to be stored somewhere in the cloud, and kept alive for as long as the story stays online. That is the one cost that never stops.
Here you will find no ads. Nothing is resold and there is no subscription. So there is no other source of income to cover the cost of storage.
What you are paying for is the publication itself: a page of your own that stays up, an address you can share, a place in the discovery map and in search results — and the hosting that keeps serving it to whoever opens the link.
The price follows storage
A story is billed €1 per 1 GB tier of media, each started tier being due in full.
1 GB, about 350 photos and 30 minutes of video. Media do not all weigh the same: it will be a bit more or a bit less depending on their quality.
It is a one-off payment, not a rent: once, for the lifetime of the site. Once the story is published, nothing more is ever billed for it, however many people read it and however long it stays online.
Your GPS files are kept too, and they count towards the space taken like everything else — but next to the photos they weigh almost nothing. Mapito does not give your media files back: keep your own copy.
Your first story is free, up to 1 GB
We have caught your curiosity and you want an idea of what it looks like? Tell your story from start to finish, put it online and see the result! You pay nothing as long as its content stays under 1 GB.
This offer is valid once.
What that looks like in practice
A 6-day story — GT20, 526 km, 9,159 m of climbing, 58 photos and 6 videos — weighs 85 MB of media: it will cost you €1.
Read that trip — it is the one the figures above are measured on.
A 4-day story — Sisteron – Nice, 281 km, 4,235 m of climbing, 94 photos and 18 videos — weighs 230 MB of media: it will cost you €1.
Read that trip — it is the one the figures above are measured on.
Imagine a 30-day story with 1,200 photos and 40 minutes of video. That would come to about 2.3 GB, so €3.
The idea is simple: the more heavy media you add to your story, the higher the price. The story of a weekend on the bike or of a week hiking the GR20 will cost you only €1. A six-month trip around the world will cost you more…
The editor shows on screen what your publication will cost: it weighs the media while you upload them, and what the next tier would cost before it is due. You will never have to guess the price of your next publication.
What costs nothing
- Creating an account
- Writing in draft mode
- Reading the stories, with no account and no ads
- Importing your GPS files, in GPX, TCX or FIT, and exporting each stage as GPX
- Being several people feeding the story with text, photos and videos
Only the space a published story takes up is billed. Nothing else costs anything, and nothing is held back for a higher plan — there is no higher plan.
How do you pay?
You top up a credit balance, from €5. With each publication, the price is deducted from your balance.
- Credit does not expire, and it is not transferable to another account.
- Unspent credit is refunded in full within fourteen days of the top-up, on request.
- Credit already spent on publishing is not refunded: publishing is the service being delivered.
- Unpublishing or deleting a story does not get you a refund.