name: Valhalla FinOps - Self-Hosted Cost Guidance
description: >-
  Valhalla is MIT-licensed open-source software with no software licensing costs.
  All costs are infrastructure-related and depend on the geographic coverage,
  request volume, and hardware provisioning. This document provides guidance on
  the cost dimensions of running Valhalla in production.
license: MIT
license_url: https://github.com/valhalla/valhalla/blob/master/LICENSE.md

cost_model: infrastructure_only
vendor_costs: none
saas_pricing: none

cost_dimensions:
  - name: Compute
    description: >-
      CPU and RAM are the primary cost drivers. Routing computations are
      CPU-intensive, especially for matrix and isochrone endpoints. RAM
      requirements scale with the size of the routing graph loaded into memory.
    guidance:
      - Planet-wide graph: 16–64 GB RAM recommended
      - Regional extract (e.g., Western Europe): 8–16 GB RAM typical
      - Small regional extract (single country): 4–8 GB RAM typical
      - High-throughput deployments benefit from multiple cores for parallel request handling

  - name: Storage
    description: >-
      Valhalla uses tiled graph data derived from OSM. Storage requirements
      depend on geographic coverage.
    guidance:
      - Full planet tiles: ~90–150 GB (varies by costing profiles enabled)
      - Regional extract: proportionally smaller
      - Elevation data (Skadi): additional ~15–30 GB for global coverage

  - name: Data Preparation (Tile Building)
    description: >-
      Building routing tiles from OSM data (via mjolnir) is a one-time or
      periodic CPU-intensive job. Planet-wide tile builds can take several hours
      on high-core-count machines.
    guidance:
      - Planet tile build: 4–12 hours on 32-core machine with 64 GB RAM
      - Regional builds: proportionally faster
      - Recommended to update tiles weekly or monthly for fresh OSM data

  - name: Bandwidth
    description: >-
      Outbound bandwidth for API responses. Routing responses are typically
      small JSON payloads (a few KB). Isochrone and expansion endpoints
      can return larger GeoJSON responses.
    guidance:
      - Standard routing responses: 1–10 KB per request
      - Isochrone with polygon: 10–100 KB per request
      - Expansion responses: potentially several MB for large areas

  - name: Elevation Data
    description: >-
      Optional elevation support uses Skadi tiles from the TileZen project
      hosted on AWS Open Data. Data download is free; storage and processing
      costs apply.
    source: https://registry.opendata.aws/tilezen-terrain-tiles/
    cost: free_to_download

commercial_providers:
  description: >-
    Several commercial providers offer managed Valhalla-as-a-service, removing
    infrastructure management overhead at a per-request or subscription cost.
  providers:
    - name: Stadia Maps
      url: https://docs.stadiamaps.com/routing/
      notes: Offers Valhalla routing as part of maps API subscription
    - name: Transitland
      url: https://www.transit.land/documentation/routing-platform/valhalla/
      notes: Provides Valhalla routing for transit-aware applications
    - name: GIS-OPS
      url: https://gis-ops.com/
      notes: Offers managed Valhalla hosting and professional services

optimization_tips:
  - Use regional OSM extracts instead of the full planet if your use case is geographically bounded
  - Cache frequent routing results to reduce compute costs
  - Enable request timeouts to prevent runaway computations on malformed requests
  - Monitor /expansion and /matrix endpoint usage as they are the most compute-intensive
  - Use protocol buffer format for high-throughput applications to reduce serialization overhead