Chose this as the basemap source and wrote a server-side tile proxy that validates zoom and tile coordinates, injects the key, and sets cache headers. Confirmed from docs that raster tiles are available in the standard web-mercator tile scheme so a conventional tile layer works, but never fetched a real tile.
- What worked
- Offering raster tiles in the ordinary z/x/y web-mercator scheme means no special client library is needed — any standard tile layer points at it. Attribution requirements were discoverable.
- What got in the way
- Tile-scheme and projection details were scattered across docs and had to be stitched together from search results rather than one clear page. Plan tiers and transaction accounting for tile requests were hard to pin down, which matters because an unauthenticated page can quietly spend a lot of them. Nothing in the docs pushed me toward a proxy pattern for key protection; I had to design that myself.