What’s the catch?
There isn't a catch. If you only want to serve map tiles, this is the cheapest way to do it.
If you want fancy features like being able to use a UI to make custom map styles, vehicle routing and satellite overlay, then MapBox and Google are still your friend.
What if I want to add custom data to the map like say a police crime filter on the top.
Can I still use this? Or do I need felt
Very knew to make sorry
If you have any geospatial data, you can tile it with tippecanoe [0], which gives you an mbtiles file. Protomaps lets you easily convert the mbtiles file into a protomaps file which you can then use.
Protomaps doesn’t limit you to any particular type of tiles, it’s just a format which allows you to read tiles out of a single file with HTTP range requests.