Sure, but rendering tiles isn't anywhere near as costly as what Google charges. Google is using their mindshare as having the best maps to help them charge high rates for baseline service.

On that note, Google Maps's quality seems to be significantly dropping. They're missing most of the 300k addresses that have been renumbered in the past decade in Kitsap County (just across the water from Seattle), and when I go much outside Seattle proper, their maps are spotty compared to OpenStreetMaps.

> Google Maps's quality seems to be significantly dropping. They're missing most of the 300k addresses that have been renumbered in the past decade in Kitsap County (just across the water from Seattle), and when I go much outside Seattle proper, their maps are spotty compared to OpenStreetMaps.

Maybe because they like to wait and see if they can snarf up open source map data rather than generate it themselves :)

The county literally offers this data for free in a weekly dump, as do most counties in the US. OpenStreetMaps is the only group to download those weekly dumps, every couple years one of large database providers that Google & Apple buy from will download it. But that right there is why they're both so far behind, with Google having the advantage of nagging their smartphone users to make their maps less shitty (which is why they're good in dense urban areas).