About Visa Map

Visa Map is a continuously-updated atlas of bilateral visa policy — pick any of ~199 passports and see exactly what every other country requires, in a single glance.

Who it's for

Frequent travelers planning multi-country trips. Relocation agencies advising clients. Immigration lawyers triaging caseloads. Travel-fintech and visa-tech startups validating new market entry. Journalists and policy researchers tracking shifting borders. Anyone who's ever wondered "do I need a visa for this trip?" and wanted the answer in two seconds instead of fifteen tabs.

How it's built

Visa Map ingests bilateral visa status from government primary sources (consular sites, official policy documents) for each origin–destination pair. Where official sources are silent, we triangulate via Wikipedia's policy pages with explicit citation back to consular references. Every record carries provenance — source URL, capture date, model used for extraction.

The map renders on open infrastructure: MapLibre GL JS for the renderer, Protomaps PMTiles for the basemap (a single planet file hosted on our own Cloudflare R2 bucket, no third-party tile vendors in the runtime path). No tracking pixels, no third-party analytics, no behavioral profiling.

The map is free; the data has a price

Browsing the map costs nothing — that's the point. We make the raw structured dataset (CSV, GeoJSON, Parquet) available for purchase to teams that want to build on top of it: three tiers from a one-time snapshot to authenticated API access. Buying funds the monthly refreshes that keep the free map current.

Refresh cadence

The map updates monthly. Each refresh pulls the latest from primary sources and re-extracts the bilateral data against a typed schema before redeploying.

Source code & licenses

The renderer (MapLibre GL JS, BSD-3) and basemap (Protomaps, derived from OpenStreetMap under ODbL) are open source. Our extraction code lives in the visa-map repository on GitHub. The dataset itself is licensed for internal use within your organization; redistribution requires a separate license — contact us.