About Tiermaps

Tiermaps is a free set of chart editors that run in your browser. You can rank things in tiers, color a map, label a venn diagram, run a bracket, layer an iceberg chart, and more: every editor on the site is listed below. Making a chart and exporting it need no account, and every chart exports as a PNG you own. An account is needed for one thing, publishing, because a published chart is a public page with a name on it.

Who runs it

The site is built and run by one independent developer. It is not owned by, affiliated with, or endorsed by Reddit, TierMaker, or any of the other chart tools it is often compared to. The operating entity, its postal address and the governing law are named in the Terms of Service, which is the document that actually binds us both.

Where it came from

These editors did not start on the web. They started as apps inside Reddit communities, where people made alignment charts, tier lists, colored maps and political compasses in the comments of a post. Those apps kept hitting the same wall: a chart made inside one community stayed inside it. This site is those editors rebuilt as ordinary web pages, so a chart has a link, a preview image and a page of its own.

The Reddit apps are still live and still developed. This site is a separate build, not a mirror: it has its own accounts, its own storage and its own moderation, and it never publishes a Reddit username. Your site handle is one you choose yourself, once, and it has nothing to do with any Reddit name.

What you can make

How your work is stored

While you are editing, your chart is saved in your own browser, so closing the tab does not lose it. When you publish, the chart is copied to our servers and gets a public page. Images you add are uploaded and served from our own image host rather than being hotlinked from wherever they came from, which is what keeps a published chart from quietly breaking months later.

An anonymous chart is held together by an edit link that only your browser knows. Signing in is optional and does exactly one thing: it attaches the charts you have made to an account so they survive a cleared browser and follow you to another device. See Privacy for what is collected and why.

Publishing, moderation and takedowns

Everything on the public pages was published by a person using these tools. Published charts are scanned automatically for adult and graphic imagery, anyone can report a chart from its own page, and repeated reports hide a chart pending review. If something of yours was published here without permission, the copyright page explains how to have it removed.

Where the map data comes from

The maps are not drawn by us. Every boundary comes from data somebody else surveyed and published under an open license: national mapping agencies, statistics offices, geoBoundaries, Natural Earth and the US Census Bureau. We simplified and reprojected all of it to make it draw fast in a browser, which means none of it is accurate to the source and none of those organizations endorse this site. The credits page names every set, who made it, what license it carries and what we changed. It is also the only place any of it has to be credited: we only ship a map whose license allows commercial use and accepts a credit on one page, so nothing from the data ends up printed on an image you export.

How the site pays for itself

Advertising, and nothing else. There is no paid tier, no export paywall and no chart held back behind a login. An exported image carries the site address in small type in one corner of the picture, with nothing drawn across the chart itself, and there is nothing to buy that removes it. Ads appear on the browsing and landing pages; they are labeled, they never sit inside a chart, and the editors themselves stay clear of them on a phone. Storage, image hosting and the server are what those ads pay for.

Getting in touch

Corrections, bug reports, feature requests and takedown notices all have a home on the contact page.