- Free allowance
- A pre-generated planet gazetteer of over 21 million place names as a gzip-compressed TSV, 1.34 GB on the download page (1,437,702,497 bytes by a ranged read), free to use in projects, products and research, with no account
- Verdict
- self-hosted, last resortverdict qualifies-with-caveat: usable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path. Self-hosted options are listed last, because this site is for users who have no hardware.
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- anonymousno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- noneno named constraint binds
- Evidence
- documented20 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-12-03checked 2026-11-02 (live); stale on 2026-12-03
| Free tier | a pre-generated planet gazetteer of over 21 million place names as a gzip-compressed TSV, 1.34 GB on the download page (1,437,702,497 bytes by a ranged read), free to use in projects, products and research, with no account unit unlimited; metered on none; the data is a file, not a query service: geocoding against it needs a search server that the user installs and runs; the hosted autocomplete endpoint at osmnames.org takes a key parameter whose issuer and quota are unverified |
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| Price | none stated |
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| Binding | none static files with no published download limit |
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| Identity | anonymous no account; public downloads from GitHub Releases |
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| Egress | not applicable: static release files with no download limit published |
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| Per-object cap | one planet file of 1,437,702,497 bytes (the v2.0.4 planet-latest_geonames.tsv.gz that the download page links); country and bounding-box extracts are cut from it with zcat and awk (1437702497 bytes) |
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| Retention | static release files on GitHub Releases with no expiry stated; the newest release holds OpenStreetMap data of 2022-11-25 |
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| Interface | rest HTTPS download of planet-latest_geonames.tsv.gz from GitHub Releases; a ranged read of the first 1,024 bytes answered HTTP 206 with no account; the project's search server speaks an autocomplete form /q/<query>.js?key=<key> and an incomplete Nominatim-compatible API |
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| Tooling | curl or wget, zcat and awk or any TSV tool for the data file; for geocoding the user installs and runs the open-source OSMNames search server (the klokantech/osmnames-sphinxsearch Docker image, or the Flask service with SphinxSearch) on a rented or free machine |
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| Composes with | the no-account route to a global place-name gazetteer with bounding boxes, ranks and administrative hierarchy, for bulk matching or for a search index that the user builds; geocoding queries need a server that the user installs and runs, so a hosted geocoder with a free allowance comes first and this is the last resort |
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| Reliability | the newest release, v2.2.0, holds OpenStreetMap data of 2022-11-25 with no housenumbers, and the download page links the older v2.0.4 file; the pages state no refresh schedule |
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| Notes | Free requests: unmetered static file download, no account. Rate limit: none published. Bulk path: the planet TSV download. The geocoder itself is software that the user installs and runs, the last resort among geocoding options. |
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| Evidence note | documented the download page, the API page, the docs, the about page and the releases page were quoted on 2026-11-02, and a ranged read of the planet file answered HTTP 206 with a total size of 1,437,702,497 bytes. The whole file was not downloaded, so its content was not checked. |
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| Parsed numbers | |
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