Why pre-generated tiles hide long-term storage and CDN costs When dynamic tiles buy you freshness and when they become a compute tax How vector tiles change the cost/size/latency calculus compared to raster Cache strategies and hybrid patterns that actually reduce TCO A practical framework to choose and implement a tile strategy Pre-generated tiles give you predictable, sub-100ms responses at the expense of storage, CDN egress, and messy invalidation. Dynamic tiles swap those steady costs for CPU, database pressure, and operational complexity — the correct balance depends on what you serve, how often it changes, and where your users are. The Challenge Your product teams demand crisp, interactive maps with near-real-time overlays, while finance insists on a low monthly bill and SREs refuse origin load spikes. The symptom set is consistent: big monthly object-storage line items, sudden latency spikes after cache purges, lots of traffic to origin after a data update, and endless micro-optimizations around TTLs.…