We picked it specifically because Mapbox was too expensive. We pay like between 20 and 30 euros each month for tens of thousands of transactions. You can also buy tile sets and serve your own vector tiles, but it isn't worth the hassle for us.

Have you ever compared it to https://github.com/Overv/openstreetmap-tile-server ?

No. We no longer want to bother with monthly updates and the overhead of maintaining our own tile server over <30€/month. We tried to make our own raster tile server several years before vector tiles were a thing, using tilecache, then tilestache and just gave up because of the storage and hardware requirements. Plus there's a lot of work involved in customizing your maps - we didn't want to show the standard OSM map built for mappers in mind but a transport oriented map for fleet tracking. MapTiler has almost everything we want except good Africa coverage.

Makes sense, thanks for your explanation.

You can spin up an own instance in a docker container easily (if you self host everything anyways).

Yeah just saw that after making the comment, thanks!