If you’ve been using Elephant Journey recently, you might have noticed that the map doesn’t always load the way it should. Everything else in the app is running fine, but the map has been giving us a hard time.
Here’s the story. In August 2025, something amazing happened — our community suddenly grew faster than we ever expected. We crossed 15,000 active users in Sri Lanka, and in places like Galgamuwa we’ve already seen people working together and sharing real-time information to protect both humans and elephants. That’s huge for us — and it shows that this app really matters.
But growth comes with challenges. With so many new users, our Google Maps bill suddenly spiked to almost $500/month. Since Elephant Journey isn’t a money-making project (and we don’t want to lock essential features behind paywalls), we simply couldn’t keep up with that cost. So, we made a tough but necessary call — we switched from Google Maps to our own map server.
That’s why the map may sometimes load slowly. The good news is we’ve already stabilized it to a great extent. If your map still doesn’t show, please make sure you’ve installed the latest app update — it should fix the issue.
Running this service now costs us around $300–500/month, and every cent goes into keeping the app alive and improving. If you believe in what we’re building, we’d love your support — because together, we can save lives and protect elephants.
Reach us anytime:
📧 [email protected]
📧 [email protected]
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