Hi, I'm Leo, a humble skier who misses the untimely departed FATMAP. As you all know, the winter map layer for the Alps—and indeed for the whole world—is currently only available on Strava behind a paywall.
The only free tool available, as far as I know, is RealityMaps. It is truly amazing, offering high-detail 3D terrain. For most Austrian resorts, they even have free aerial winter imagery available (which is significantly better than satellite imagery). The only downside is that they are available ONLY for Austria.
Of course, there is also skimomap.com, but with all due respect to their effort, winter satellite imagery is unavailable in most places.
The main problem with providing free access to a detailed winter layer is that purchasing all the necessary imagery would cost at least $5-10 million, not counting infrastructure and maintenance. For a solo developer, this is largely unaffordable.
Here, it is implemented differently than a standard continuous satellite map. Naturally, this approach has downsides—such as the inability to manually overlay images with perfect precision, images sometimes stretching incorrectly, missing details due to the photo angle, and the need for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of photos just for the Alps to achieve minimal useful coverage.
But one way or another, I don't see a better path. Moreover, photos taken with a phone or drone vastly surpass the quality of any satellite imagery in most cases, often matching or even exceeding aerial photography.
And yes—I do not plan to restrict access to the winter layer or put it behind a paywall.
However, I may have to introduce donations if the site becomes popular enough. Currently, the infrastructure is designed for a maximum of 50–100 active daily users and 5,000–10,000 uploaded photos. This costs me approximately €100 per year, but with high traffic, costs will rise sharply, and I would like to at least cover them.
If you would like to contact me, here is my email address:
leo@winter-map.com
You can also join our Discord server: discord.winter-map.com
(Don't be afraid of the custom URL—it's just a Cloudflare redirect to my Discord to prevent bots from scraping the invite link).