CARTO Basemaps
Get your Basemaps API key
Free, no account, in your inbox in a minute. Add it to your tile URLs and the "API key required" watermark goes away.
Sign in to your dashboard
No password. We e-mail you a link that signs you in; from the dashboard you can see this month's usage per key, add restrictions, create more keys or delete them.
For non-commercial use: personal projects, research, teaching, non-profits. Counted across all your keys, raster and vector.
Above that, Basemaps Commercial at $500/month or $5,000 a year for up to 10M, or Commercial Plus at $1,500/month or $15,000 a year for up to 50M, bought from your dashboard. Keys registered before 23 September 2026 keep working as they are until 30 November 2026.
Basemaps are part of every CARTO plan. Request your key here and write to support-basemaps@carto.com with your account number; we mark it as covered.
© OpenStreetMap contributors, © CARTO, on every map, free tiers and plan alike. The key is yours: do not share it across unrelated projects.
Why a key at all? It lets us see who uses the service and how much, warn you before a limit, and keep it free for most maps. The story, in the FAQ.
Add it to your tile URL
One parameter, on every tile, style, glyph and sprite URL under basemaps.cartocdn.com. Raster and vector alike; the same key covers both.
// raster https://basemaps.cartocdn.com/rastertiles/voyager/{z}/{x}/{y}.png?key=YOUR_KEY // vector https://basemaps.cartocdn.com/gl/voyager-gl-style/style.json?key=YOUR_KEY
Free for most maps. Two plans for the rest.
Tile requests are counted per calendar month (UTC) across all the keys on your account. Nothing changes at the edge when you upgrade: same key, same URLs.
Up to 5M requests a month. Personal projects, research, teaching, non-profits.
Up to 1M requests a month for a business, with the same key.
Or $5,000 a year. Up to 10M requests a month. By card from your dashboard, cancel any time; the paid term runs to its end.
Or $15,000 a year. Up to 50M requests a month. Same key, same dashboard, same terms.
In every CARTO plan. Nothing to buy, no quota to watch.
Plus applicable taxes. More than 50M a month, or something custom? Talk to us. The detail is in the Basemaps terms.
dashboard.basemaps.carto.com/v1/plans: tiers, quotas, the attribution line, the URL templates. A person still requests the key; the assistant should tell you how.