Leaflet is open source and free. However the examples on leaflet site use Mapbox to render map. Mapbox is more expensive than Google map (Mapbox pricing). The question is: can anyone use Leaflet really free?
You can use the Leaflet library for free, only the tileprovider used in the examples, Mapbox, asks money for serving tiles. You just need a free tileprovider like OpenStreetMap for instance:
var map = new L.Map('leaflet', {
center: [0, 0],
zoom: 0,
layers: [
new L.TileLayer('http://{s}.tile.openstreetmap.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png', {
'attribution': 'Map data © <a href="http://openstreetmap.org">OpenStreetMap</a> contributors'
})
]
});body {
margin: 0;
}
html, body, #leaflet {
height: 100%;
}<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Leaflet 1.0.3</title>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="//unpkg.com/leaflet@1.0.3/dist/leaflet.css" />
</head>
<body>
<div id="leaflet"></div>
<script type="application/javascript" src="//unpkg.com/leaflet@1.0.3/dist/leaflet.js"></script>
</body>
</html>