A NextBillion.ai alternative you can price and start today.
Both platforms sell routing, matrices and optimisation to fleets. They differ on whether you can start without a sales call, whether a price is published, what their documented API actually models, and who owns the company. A MapMap self-host licence running the routing engine starts at £12,000 per year and is published; NextBillion quotes every tier.
How to read this page
The right-hand column quotes or paraphrases published documentation, terms or pricing from NextBillion.ai, and every row links to the page it came from so you can check it yourself. Where we could not source a claim from NextBillion's own documentation, product pages or API specification, the row is not on this page rather than worded more vaguely. If you find a row that has gone stale, tell us and we will correct it.Every NextBillion claim below was fetched from the page it links to and read on 3 September 2026.
NextBillion publishes no dated terms document, so the page carries one read date rather than an edition. Sources are their FAQ, pricing page, on-premises page, routing documentation, the OpenAPI document their documentation loads, their public MCP repository and their about page. Figures that move with a release, such as a tool count, sit in a dated row rather than in the lead.
How you get an API key
One unauthenticated call issues a working key, card-free: POST /v1/keys with an email and a terms acceptance. Verify the email and the free tier is 50,000 calls a month, commercial use allowed.
No form, no call, no account manager. An agent can do it unattended, which is the point: the same path is what the MCP server and the machine-payments rail assume.
The trial is arranged rather than issued. Their FAQ states: “we offer a trial API key for a week or two”, and recommends: “book a trial onboarding call and get a trial API key”.
NextBillion FAQ. Their Cloud Console documentation describes the same order of events from the other side: “Once you complete the setup of your business account with Nextbillion, Nextbillion will create your account and send you a verification link for account setup”, and the signup answer begins “Once your Business account is set up with Nextbillion”, directing you to use a work email on your company's domain.
Published price
Per-call prices, plan prices and self-host licence anchors are all published, and machine-readable at /pricing.json. The self-host ladder starts at £2,500 per year for a serving-only deployment, and at £12,000 for one that runs the routing engine.
Every figure above is read from /pricing.json at build time rather than typed here, so this page cannot drift from the price surface.
Their pricing page lists three bundles, Basic, Advanced and Bespoke Route Planning, and carries no figures. The call to action on every tier and every feature row is “Request a Quote”.
The page's own FAQ sets out the model without pricing it: three units, “per-order, per-asset or per-API call”, where “The per unit price is calculated based on your monthly usage volume and average order value”, sold as “annual commitment licenses” with a monthly payment option, and a free trial described as a “2-3 week free evaluation where our solutions team helps you test the API”. This row is about their own pricing page; per-request rates for Distance Matrix elements are published on their AWS Marketplace listing.
Running it on your own infrastructure
Self-hosting is a published product, not a tier gate. One Docker Compose stack brings up the gateway, the routing engine with truck and ADR costing, an optional first-party geocoder and an optional MCP server, and the licence anchors are on the pricing page.
The same build that runs at api.mapmap.ai. Air-gapped installs run from signed territory packages mirrored inside your network, you hold the signing key, and a deployment whose subscription lapses keeps serving the data it already holds.
On-premises deployment is offered and is gated to the top plan. Quoted: “On-premise deployment is available exclusively under our Enterprise pricing plan. Reach out to our sales team to discuss your requirements and get a customized quote.”
The same page names three modules as deployable behind your firewall, the Directions API, the Distance Matrix API and the Route Optimization API, on “any Kubernetes cluster”, and says you “can select exactly which modules fit your business needs”. It is silent about the rest of the catalogue rather than excluding it. Listed here because on-premises routing is a genuine point of parity; the difference is the gate and the published price.
Dangerous goods (ADR)
ADR 8.6.4 tunnel categories are modelled, not approximated. Declare a tunnel code B to E with hazmat on the truck profile and the costing enforces it; POST /adr/check answers the tunnel-entry question with no routing at all.
The route response returns applied_adr so you can see what was enforced. We are equally plain about the limit: this reflects what the map and the ADR matrix record, and it certifies nothing. The duty holder remains the operator.
Their truck routing carries a flat hazmat filter rather than an ADR model: hazmat_type takes explosives, gas, flammable_liquid, flammable_gas, organic, toxic, radioactive, corrosive or other, and “the service will avoid roads which are not suitable for the type of goods specified”.
Stated in the Directions API parameter reference and in the OpenAPI document their documentation loads (docs.nextbillion.io/openapi.json, titled “Navigation APIs (NBRoute)”). That specification contains no ADR tunnel category, no tunnel-restriction code and no placard concept anywhere. Tunnels are all or nothing through avoid=tunnel, so a load permitted in a category D tunnel but not a category E one cannot be expressed. The documented truck parameters are truck_size, truck_weight, truck_axle_load, truck_type and emission_class.
Electric vehicle planning
POST /v1/ev/plan plans the journey with its charge stops: physics consumption over the route's own legs, charge times integrated over the vehicle's charging curve, and stops chosen so the state of charge never breaches the reserve floor.
When no plan exists it answers feasible: false with the cause and the furthest reachable point, rather than inventing one. Charge points come from operator-published feeds, so every response states which operators it covers and an empty result means none from those operators, never none here.
Their published routing API index lists Directions, Distance Matrix, Route Optimization, Navigation, Snap to Road, Isochrone, Hours of Service, Route Report and Batch Routing. No EV route planning or charge-stop endpoint appears among them.
The OpenAPI document their documentation loads carries no parameter for battery capacity, state of charge or charging, and its only battery field is battery_level, documented as “the battery level of the GPS device, as a percentage” in the asset-tracking API. A use-case page on their marketing site describes EV route planning; it names no endpoint and no parameter, so there is nothing here to compare an API against.
Agent surface
A hosted MCP server at mcp.mapmap.ai/mcp that an agent can connect to with no key at all under fair use, carrying the same truck and ADR costing the API does, with an x402 lane for machine payments, plus llms.txt, llms-full.txt, an OpenAPI document and machine-readable pricing on every deployment.
Anonymous callers get an evaluation lane rather than a locked door; present an snk_ key to bill calls to your own account and lift the limits. Ten agent skills ship separately as MIT-licensed knowledge modules. What the surface can do is the comparison; how many tools express it is the dated row below.
Their MCP server is published on GitHub under an Apache-2.0 licence. It requires NBAI_API_KEY and exits if it is unset, so there is no keyless lane, and the tools it exposes are search, geocoding, routing and static-image calls with no dangerous-goods concept among them.
Its deployment notes describe the hosted streamable-HTTP mode as a placeholder that is “deliberately empty in the MVP”, leaving stdio as the transport, and their documentation site carries no MCP page.
Tools published on each MCP server
read on 3 September 202643 tools on the hosted server.
A count is a weak thing to lead on, because it moves with every release, so it is a dated row here rather than a headline. Ours is checked in CI: scripts/mcp-tool-inventory.mjs fails the build when any published surface disagrees with the server's own registry, so the figure on this page cannot drift from the server.
15 tools: autocomplete, autosuggest, directions, distance_matrix, geocode_batch, geocode_forward, geocode_reverse, geocode_structured, isochrone, place_lookup, place_search, postcode_lookup, search_along_route, static_map_image and static_route_map.
Counted from the tool registry in the repository linked here. An earlier server at nextbillion-ai/nbai-mcp exposes 7 tools and was last committed to in July 2025. Read this row as a snapshot of the day beside it, not as a standing fact.
Who owns the company
MapMap AI Ltd is independently owned and has no parent company.
The reason to care about either answer is continuity, and the self-host licence is the part that does not depend on ownership: the stack runs on your own hardware from signed packages, no licence server has to be reachable, and a deployment keeps serving the data it holds if the subscription lapses.
Quoted from their about page: “In 2025, NextBillion.ai began a new chapter as part of Velocitor Solutions, a recognized leader in enterprise telematics and fleet management technology”, and “Both brands continue independently, but now we jointly offer end-to-end fleet management software, apps, and hardware, with routing powered by NextBillion.ai.”
Their own announcement, datelined 1 October 2025, reports that the ownership group of Velocitor Solutions “has completed the full acquisition of NextBillion.ai”, and adds that “both companies will continue to operate under their current brands in the immediate future”. Stated because an acquisition is a fact a buyer weighs, and left there: no terms were disclosed and nothing on this page is built on top of it.
Start without asking permission.
One call issues a key and the free tier is 50,000 calls a month with no card, so an evaluation is something you run rather than something you book. Self-host licences are published, and one running the routing engine starts at £12,000 per year.
Other comparisons: the full list.