God's Eye View: a 'spy satellite in the browser' goes open source — we tested it and built our own version for €0

2026-08-26 · Firmatic

On 24 August 2026 Bilawal Sidhu — a former product manager at Google Maps — put the code of God's Eye View on GitHub under the MIT licence. Two days later it had 4,600 stars and almost 1,200 forks. The idea is simple and contagious: a photorealistic 3D Earth in the browser showing everything happening right now — aircraft on real telemetry, ships via AIS, satellites from orbital elements, USGS earthquakes, NASA fires, traffic, public cameras projected into the 3D city, and voice control: "take me to LAX and select the nearest aircraft".

Bilawal Sidhu's video on the open-source release of God's Eye View

The author's video. It loads only after a click — until then YouTube sends nothing to your browser.

What we verified ourselves

We don't take social media posts at their word, so we cloned the repository and ran it. What holds up: the code is clean (vanilla JavaScript, CesiumJS, Vite — no framework), well tested (2,601 unit tests, all green) and the dev server starts in 0.4 seconds. Ten of the thirteen layers really work without a key: the anonymous OpenSky channel gave us 7,427 aircraft in one go. What doesn't hold up: the author was a product manager, not a developer, and Cesium ion is optional — not one of "the keys you need".

The key finding: without a Google key the planet stays black. The app doesn't crash — HUD, contacts list and aircraft work — but the photorealistic image is exactly the part you buy from Google. The Map Tiles API bills per session: 1,000 sessions a month free, then $6 per 1,000. You can set a daily quota so you never leave the free tier, but a billing account with a credit card is mandatory.

The fine print the post left out

The "backend" is the Vite dev server: one 7,383-line file brokering every API key. The author himself says it is not a production service — whoever hosts it publicly exposes their keys to anyone who reaches the port.
The submarine cables come from TeleGeography under CC BY-NC-SA: no commercial use. On a company website that layer has to go.
Cesium ion's free plan (Bing imagery, terrain) is for non-commercial use only; commercial starts at $149 a month.
Voice control runs through the OpenAI Realtime API — optional, but billed per minute of audio.

What we built instead

For a showcase on our own site we didn't want a credit card attached to Google or a key server to maintain. So we built The sky over the Netherlands, live — a 3D globe using only public, keyless sources: aircraft from adsb.lol (OpenSky as fallback), the ISS and ~150 bright satellites from CelesTrak elements propagated in your browser, USGS earthquakes, and NASA GIBS imagery in the public domain (Blue Marble plus yesterday's VIIRS image). The only server-side piece is a Netlify edge function that fetches the aircraft every ten seconds and serves them to every visitor from cache: a hundred visitors from the same region are still one request to the source every ten seconds.

Why this is more than a toy

This is exactly how we work with clients. Before proposing a paid API, a SaaS subscription or an "enterprise integration", we check whether the same result is possible with what is already free and public. Surprisingly often it is. Want to learn that yourself, on your own computer, in one afternoon? That's the 1-on-1 training.

To run God's Eye View yourself: github.com/bilawalsidhu/gods-eye-view. Node 24.14 or 26, a Google Maps key with a capped daily quota — and keep the server on localhost.