Mapbox sometimes requiring a credit card for sign up?

[chancancode]

The purpose of using Mapbox in the tutorial is to give the readers an opportunity to interact with a "real world API" and keep things grounded in reality.

Historically, Mapbox didn't require a credit card for sign up and the API we use is free with a pretty generous limit (w.r.t. what we are doing in the tutorial), so it seemed like a good choice. This is still the case for me as of my testing on Oct 24, 2022, but we have a report that Mapbox required a valid credit card for "verification" before they can access the API. It's doesn't happen to everyone and it's unclear what triggered it in that case.

For what it's worth, the Mapbox API key isn't "strictly necessarily" for continuing with the tutorial. Readers can put in any placeholder (made-up) API keys and it doesn't "break" the tutorial, per-se. The tests will still pass and everything else still works, but they will get broken images in place of the maps:

It's unfortunate, but maybe not a dealbreaker, if you are able to look pass that. Just stating that here in case you ran into this situation and didn't feel like giving your credit card to Mapbox. If you ran into this it would be great for you to leave a 👎🏼 or a comment so we can track how often it happens.

That said it's certainly not an ideal situation and we should probably look into what we can do about it. Ideally we would find a fairly similar replacement so we wouldn't have to re-write a lot of the content to make it fit. If you know of any good options please suggest something here!