# Free FiveM minimaps, and what a paid one adds

> Which free FiveM minimap packs are MIT-licensed and genuinely usable, what a paid map adds on top, and the day it is worth $8 instead of another download.

Source: https://fam-tools.com/guides/free-vs-premium-fivem-minimap · FAM Tools · published 2026-09-14 · updated 2026-09-14 · about 12 min

**Short answer.** Use a free MIT-licensed pack — `oulsen_satmap` or `neen-atlasmap` — if your server is new, you do not take money yet, and you do not mind running the same map as several hundred other servers. Move to a paid map ($8.00 here) the day you want the map to look like your server: your palette, your postal decision, your logo, a stated licence, and a resource that ships every dictionary the game asks for with full mip chains. Free is the right answer until the map needs to be yours; on that day, $8 is the cheapest way to get there.

## Key points

- The two best free packs are both MIT licensed and both complete. They are not demos.
- Free means shared: the same texture is running on hundreds of servers, and none of them can put their name on it.
- The technical differences — sheet size, mip chains, DXT5 — are checkable, and most free packs fail at least one.
- A baked postal grid is a one-way door. Free packs rarely give you the choice.
- Licence is the cost nobody counts until they take a donation.
- At $8, a premium map costs less than an hour of most people’s time spent fixing a free one.

There are free FiveM-compatible minimaps that are good. Not "good for free" — good. If you have not launched yet, one of them is almost certainly the right first map, and this guide names them. But "free" and "premium" are not two qualities of the same thing; they are two different products with different costs, and the costs of the free one arrive later and in a different currency. This is what each one actually gives you, side by side, so the decision is made on facts rather than on a download counter.

## The free minimaps that are actually good

Two packs stand above the rest of the free field, and it is worth saying so plainly because a lot of "free vs paid" articles pretend the free options are all broken. They are not.

- **`oulsen_satmap`** — a satellite-style map with postal numbers already baked in. MIT licensed, complete (radar and pause map), widely used on dispatch-heavy servers. The trade-off is the satellite look itself: busy at radar size, and the postals cannot be removed.
- **`neen-atlasmap`** — a coloured atlas map with a street-name variant and a postal variant. MIT licensed, complete, cleaner than the satellite option. The trade-off is that it is the same map on every server that chose it, and there is no way to brand it.

Both are named in [the full comparison of free and paid minimaps](https://fam-tools.com/guides/best-fivem-minimaps-compared), with install notes. If you are reading this before launch, install one of them tonight and come back to this page in three months.

## Free versus premium, line by line

*What each option gives you. "Typical free" is the median forum download, not the two good packs above.*

|  | Typical free pack | Good free pack (MIT) | Premium ($8 here) |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Source resolution | Often below 6144 × 9216, upscaled | Native or close | Native 6144 × 9216 from a 226 MP source |
| Mip chains | Usually one level — shimmers | Varies | Full 11-level chain, every tile |
| Compression | DXT1 common — jagged coast | Mostly DXT5 | DXT5 throughout |
| All dictionaries | Often pause-map only | Yes | Yes — 78 stream files |
| Postal choice | Whatever was baked in | One or two fixed variants | With, without, or Google-style — your call |
| Palette choice | One | One | Twelve |
| Your logo or name | No | No | $1 per element, built into the texture |
| Licence | Usually unstated | MIT | Stated, one server network, lifetime |
| Uniqueness | Shared with everyone | Shared with everyone | Yours |
| Re-downloads / updates | Whatever the thread still hosts | GitHub | Account, free, forever |
| Support | The forum thread | GitHub issues | Discord, same day |

## The technical gap, and how to check it yourself

The game samples a fixed 2 × 3 grid of 3072-pixel tiles — 6144 × 9216 — for both the radar and the pause map. A map rendered at that size is as sharp as a FiveM-compatible minimap can be. A map rendered smaller and enlarged looks acceptable on the radar and soft on the pause map, which is exactly where players stop and look. [The technical specification](https://fam-tools.com/guides/minimap-technical-specification) has the full numbers.

Then there are mip chains. Every tile should carry a ladder of smaller copies for the GPU to sample from when the map is drawn at radar size — which is always. A tile with one mip level looks fine in a screenshot and crawls the moment the player moves. It is the single most common fault in free packs and the single easiest to check: open a .ytd in a texture viewer and read the mip count.

1. Count the .ytd files. Twelve for the map and sea plus a LOD sheet, or the radar is still on the stock texture.
2. Read the tile size. 3072 per tile, or it was upscaled.
3. Read the mip count. Anything below the full chain will shimmer.
4. Read the format. DXT5 keeps the alpha the coastline needs; DXT1 does not.

> **You can check the premium one for free** — The live preview on this site is the actual tile set in the browser, zoomable to street level. It is not a mock-up. Look at a junction before you decide anything.

## The postal decision you did not get to make

Most free maps come with a postal grid painted into the texture, because the person who made them ran a dispatch server. Once the numbers are in the art they are permanent: they cannot be toggled, and if you later run a postal script you get two sets on screen. Servers that do not use postals — racing, freeroam, gang RP — end up with a grid they never wanted; servers that want a different grid cannot have one.

A premium map here is the same render on three bases: with postals, without, or a Google-style street map, in the same twelve palettes. [Baked postals versus a postal script](https://fam-tools.com/guides/fivem-minimap-vs-postal-script) goes through which base suits which server. The point is that it is a choice, and a free pack usually does not offer it.

## The cost that has no price tag: looking like everyone else

A free map is by definition a shared map. The palette, the labels and the look are running on every other server that made the same download, and a player who has been on three of them recognises it in the first second. That is not a technical fault; it is just what free means. It matters more than it seems, because the minimap is the one piece of interface a player looks at hundreds of times an hour and the one that appears in every clip and stream.

A premium map is one of twelve palettes on three bases, so it is already unlikely to collide with the server next door — and with a logo or name placed in the studio it cannot. That is the difference $8 actually buys: not pixels, which the good free packs also have, but a map that is yours.

## Licence: free until you take money

The two good free packs are MIT licensed and you can run them on a donation-funded server without a second thought. Most other free downloads state no licence at all, which means the default — all rights reserved by whoever made it — and that is a genuine exposure the day your server has a Tebex store. Nobody is likely to come after a small server, but "nobody is likely to" is not a licence.

A paid map here comes with a stated licence: one server network, for as long as you run it, with the terms on [the licence page](https://fam-tools.com/for/fivem-minimap-licence). It is the boring part of the purchase and the part that matters most in eighteen months.

## When to stay free, and when to switch

Stay free if the server is new, you have fewer than a couple of dozen regulars, you have not decided on postals, and you are still likely to change frameworks. A good free pack costs nothing and you will learn what you want from a map by running one.

Switch when any of these becomes true: you take donations or run a store; you want your server’s name or logo on the map; you have decided about postals and the free map decided differently; a player has said the map looks like another server’s; or you have spent more than an hour trying to fix shimmer, a missing radar or a conflicting resource. At that point the premium map is the cheaper option by every measure that includes your time.

> **What it costs here** — $8.00 per map, any palette, any base. $1.00 per logo or text element. No subscription, free re-downloads, and a bundle discount if you take two. The full breakdown is in [how much a FiveM-compatible minimap costs](https://fam-tools.com/guides/how-much-does-a-fivem-minimap-cost).

## Questions

### Is there a good free FiveM-compatible minimap?

Yes — `oulsen_satmap` and `neen-atlasmap` are both MIT licensed, complete and widely used. The comparison guide covers them in detail.

### What is the difference between a free and a paid FiveM-compatible minimap?

Technically: native 6144 × 9216 sheet, full mip chains, DXT5 and every dictionary, which many free packs miss. Practically: your choice of palette and postals, your logo, a stated licence, and a map nobody else is running.

### Can I put my logo on a free minimap?

Not without the source art, which free packs do not ship. A paid map here places a logo or text in the browser studio for $1 per element and builds it into the texture.

### Is a free minimap safe to use on a donation server?

The MIT-licensed ones, yes. Packs with no stated licence are a risk the day you take money — the default is all rights reserved.

### Is a paid FiveM-compatible minimap worth it?

Once you want the map to be yours — your palette, postal decision, logo and licence — $8 is cheaper than the hour you would spend fixing a free one. Before that, use a good free pack.

## Related

- https://fam-tools.com/guides/best-fivem-minimaps-compared
- https://fam-tools.com/guides/how-much-does-a-fivem-minimap-cost
- https://fam-tools.com/guides/fivem-minimap-vs-postal-script
- https://fam-tools.com/guides/minimap-technical-specification
- https://fam-tools.com/guides/install-fivem-minimap