So there’s mapbox and and maps.me. Surely some big corporations like Amazon are using it internally for their needs but only as a small part of their business. Same for small businesses that show a map.
But who is making money (mostly) with openstreetmap?
Lots of small players.
I wouldn’t try to base an unicorn on OSM though, every attempt at that has failed to date.
I suspect that a lot of use and value is of “now we can do XYZ that was previously impossible” rather “we can make piles of money using OpenStreetMap data”
My favorite use case is I think preparation of flood evacuation plans for part of Silesia. They were using official building data augmented by OpenStreetMap. It was useful as official data was updated in 5 year cycle, and was not including illegally built residential buildings.
And in case of flood you will not tell people “you live in an illegally built house so we will leave you to drown” or “your house was built 4 years ago so you will not be evacuated”.
Without OSM I guess that they would earns similar amount of money for this project, spend similar effort but such flood preparation planes would be of markedly lower quality of what was actually created.
(AFAIK it was done as some contract, so it actually involved money making directly)
See Commercial OSM Software and Services on the OSM wiki and FOSSGIS Dienstleisterliste for a list of companies from German speaking countries offering services using OpenStreetMap.
In my area there are a fair amount of edits adding/correcting things like turn restrictions by mappers employees by Lyft. My impression is that Lyft finds it cheaper to use OSM than to pay Google or others for map services. So while they are not directly making money from OSM they are apparently avoiding costs which for a business can result in the same difference in the bottom line.
Niantic, or whoever it is that now runs Pokemon Go?
I am one of the owners of Geofabrik and our entire 5-person company is based on OpenStreetMap. Most of the business is “helping other people to use OpenStreetMap” in one way or another - it’s not like we have a mobile app that you can buy. But we might set up a server for someone else who then sells a mobile app.
I know that OpenStreetMap has also increased the market for small companies who already were in the GIS business. Before OSM, anyone wanting to build something that used significant amounts of geodata had to pay huge license fees and that would keep many players away from the market. With OSM, low-budget projects become possible, so more things are built and those who can build things have more work.