Waze drew its map from drivers' everyday trips

Commercial digital maps in the mid-2000s were licensed at prices only large companies could afford, and even licensed maps went stale as roads changed, leaving out the real-time congestion, accidents, and closures drivers actually needed to know about. Ehud Shabtai, frustrated with the inaccurate GPS software on the market, started building his own mapping project, FreeMap Israel, in 2006 — but building and maintaining a usable, current road map from scratch through paid surveying was exactly the cost problem the project couldn't get around.

The team's answer was to stop trying to build the map directly and instead capture it as a byproduct of something drivers were already doing for free: driving. The app tracked a phone's GPS trace as its owner drove to wherever they were already headed, automatically inferring and drawing roads from the accumulated traces, while a companion editing tool let volunteers refine and correct the resulting map by hand in their own time.

Recorded drivers' everyday GPS traces to draw the map, and a volunteer community filled gaps, so coverage scaled with adoption at near-zero cost.

Drivers already travel roads daily, generating GPS traces for free.

Aggregating traces automatically draws and updates roads at near-zero cost.

More users produce more traces, improving the map and attracting more users.

Volunteer editors correct gaps and errors without paid staff.

When data is too costly to buy or survey, capture it as a byproduct of an activity your users already do.

By 2021 Waze had over 50,000 volunteer map editors making 18 million monthly edits across more than 185 countries. Waze's crowd-driving and volunteer-editing model let it build and maintain a live, constantly-updated global road and traffic map without ever paying for the surveying that competitors relied on licensed data providers to do, and the approach was validated commercially when Google acquired Waze in 2013.