For geocoding / user mapping, it's worth looking at: Geo::TigerLine Geo::Coder::US ( and http://geocoder.us ) http://civicspacelabs.org/zipcodedb/ for shape drawing and projection, check out: Geo::GDAL Geo::Shapelib (which has a much nicer API than Geo::Shapefile) UMN MapServer rocks, and talks to free GIS backends like PostGIS. GRASS walks all over ESRI; http://freegis.org/ hopefully suggests that you have no need to buy ESRI products. xoxo