Paid layers
| Source | Supplies | Published cost |
|---|---|---|
| Unacast | Mobility and foot traffic | $1/API call to $40,000/yr |
| SafeGraph | Mobility and POI (now bundled inside Unacast) | $0.10/purchase to $30,000/yr |
| Esri | GIS and demographics | Enterprise licence |
| StreetLight | Travel-pattern analytics | Not published |
| Zoneomics | Zoning | Not published |
| Dataplor | POI | Not published |
Free layers that do real work
- Census / ACS: population, income, age, tenure at block-group level.
- Census OnTheMap (LEHD): block-level commute flows, the best free proxy for daytime population.
- OpenStreetMap: the road network itself, which is what makes routed catchments possible.
- State DOT counters: Texas, Washington, Colorado and Minnesota publish pedestrian and cycle counts.
The point
Data access is not a moat. National mobility data is available off the shelf to anyone with a budget. What is scarce is doing something structurally different with it.
Narrative Geo does not sample. Every trade area is routed on the actual road network with OSRM, against full Census/ACS population and a maintained POI set. The drive-time matrix is precomputed at 1.08 billion rows, so a national query across a 20,000-store chain returns in seconds rather than being metered per location.