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About Mercator Blue
What is Mercator Blue?
Mercator Blue is an API that delivers Earth observation data—like weather forecasts, ocean currents, air quality, and elevation—as tile pyramids, Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs, and value-encoded textures. These tiles are designed to be decoded directly in your WebGL shader, making it easy to integrate real-time environmental data into maps built with MapLibre, Mapbox, Leaflet, OpenLayers, deck.gl, or custom renderers.
Problem it solves
Traditionally, embedding global environmental data into a web or mobile app is complex and costly: you need to process raw model outputs, manage servers, and build custom pipelines. Mercator Blue removes that overhead by providing a STAC-compliant catalog with pre-processed tiles, letting you focus on your rendering and user experience. Its open SDK and permissive license mean you can swap renderers without being tied to a proprietary stack.
Who it's for
Ideal for developers and data scientists building mapping, climate, agriculture, logistics, or visualization tools that need live or historical Earth data. It's also great for startups and small teams that want a fast, scalable data source without the infrastructure cost. If you need global, regularly updated data in a format that your existing WebGL pipeline can consume, Mercator Blue fits perfectly. It's less suited for users who need data in tabular or GeoJSON formats without tile-based rendering.
Use cases
Use real-time wind and temperature overlays for weather apps, display ocean surface currents for marine navigation, visualize PM2.5 air quality for public health dashboards, or render elevation for terrain analysis. The free tier allows you to test with up to 10,000 tile requests per month, and paid plans scale to millions of requests.
Key features
- Four asset formats — Tile pyramid, single global PNG, Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF, and pre-colored preview; choose what fits your stack.
- STAC-shaped catalog — Standard catalog.json → collection.json → item.json; crawl with pystac, QGIS, or any STAC client.
- Open SDK — Ships under a permissive license; the tiles are the contract, swap renderers freely.
- Six headline datasets — Wind, temperature, ocean currents, PM2.5, and more, with 24 datasets in the full catalog.
- Frequent updates — Wind and temperature update every 6 hours; air quality refreshes twice daily; ocean currents every 6 hours.
- Value-encoded textures — Efficient 16-bit fixed-point encoding for high data density in WebGL shaders.
SaaSpartout Score
7.5
/10
Editorial score from our review methodology — not user ratings.
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Mercator Blue Pricing
Mercator Blue pricing: from €29/mo.
For comparison: the median starting price in Analytics & Data is $39/month, measured across 274 tools we track. See the full SaaS Pricing Index →
Free
€0/month. Includes 10,000 tile requests per month, access to all datasets, and community support. No credit card required.
Starter
€29/month. Includes 1 million tile requests per month, all datasets, and email support. Ideal for small production sites and prototypes. Most popular.
Pro
€99/month. Includes 10 million tile requests per month, all datasets, priority email support, and optional SLA on request. For high-traffic apps and commercial deployments.
Prices in EUR, billed monthly via Stripe. Cancel anytime. Need higher volume or annual billing? Contact them.
Frequently asked questions
What is Mercator Blue?
Mercator Blue is an API that provides gridded Earth data—like weather, ocean, air quality, and elevation—as tiles and textures that can be decoded in WebGL shaders. It uses STAC-standard catalogs for easy integration.
How much does Mercator Blue cost?
Mercator Blue has a free plan with up to 10,000 tile requests per month. Paid plans start at €29/month for Starter (1M requests) and €99/month for Pro (10M requests).
Is there a free trial or free plan?
Yes, there's a free plan that requires no credit card and includes 10,000 tile requests per month, enough to test the API and build prototypes.
Who is Mercator Blue best for?
It's best for developers and teams building WebGL-based maps, environmental dashboards, weather apps, or any application needing real-time global environmental data without heavy data processing.
What are the main alternatives to Mercator Blue?
Alternatives include general map tile providers like Mapbox, or specialized data services like Sentinel Hub and Google Earth Engine. However, Mercator Blue focuses on lightweight, shader-ready tiles for WebGL, with a simpler, lower-cost approach.
What is a key limitation of Mercator Blue?
The API primarily provides tile-based data, so it may not be suitable if you need raw CSVs or GeoJSON for complex spatial analysis; you'd need to handle data in a different format.
