Onfleet is one of the few routing and delivery platforms that actually publishes its pricing, which I respect. But the number itself, $599 a month to start, before you’ve routed a single stop, is exactly why people go looking for an onfleet alternative. I build optimization software for a living, and the free tool below solves the same routing math without a monthly minimum.
What Onfleet actually costs
Onfleet prices by task volume, not seats. The Launch plan starts at $599/month and includes 2,500 tasks with unlimited users. Scale runs $1,299/month for 5,000 tasks, and Enterprise is $2,999/month and up for 10,000+ tasks with custom terms. On top of that, SMS notifications to customers and driver-recipient call anonymization are billed separately by usage, and the client-facing tracking portal (Courier Suite) is a $299/month add-on. There is a 14-day free trial, but it requires selecting a plan and entering billing details up front.
The task-cap problem
The core issue for a small operation isn’t that $599 is unreasonable for what Onfleet includes, driver apps, proof of delivery, dispatcher chat, a command center. It’s that the cost is fixed and front-loaded regardless of whether you’re running 50 stops a month or 2,400. And the moment you cross a task threshold, you’re either paying overages or jumping to the next tier. For someone testing whether route optimization is even worth doing, that’s a lot to commit before finding out.
What I built instead
routing.kindoflost.com solves the vehicle routing problem with time windows and capacity constraints (VRP-TW) using Google OR-Tools and real drive times from OSRM. Upload an Excel workbook or a Google Sheets link with your stops, vehicles, and constraints, run the solver, and get routes on a map plus a downloadable CSV. There’s no task counter, no plan tier, and no monthly bill, it’s free regardless of whether you route 20 stops or a few hundred.
A quick example
Say you run a same-day flower or food delivery shop doing 150-200 orders a month across four drivers, each with a delivery window and a cooler-space limit per vehicle. That crosses Onfleet’s Launch plan task count fast, and it’s a small enough operation that $599 a month before routing a single stop is a real number to justify. It’s also exactly the size this tool was built for: time windows, per-vehicle capacity, and real drive times, solved for free.
What’s in the workbook
The whole input is one Excel workbook: a locations sheet (lat/lon, demand, service time, delivery window), a vehicles sheet (capacity, cost), a parameters sheet, and a solution sheet if you want to re-run from a prior result. Same four sheets whether you’re routing 20 stops or 200, there’s no separate task count to track against a limit, just stops and vehicles. There’s a Google Sheets version too if you’d rather skip Excel entirely.
How the routing math actually works
None of this changes based on how many tasks you run, unlike Onfleet’s billing. The solver is Google OR-Tools’ routing library running a guided local search metaheuristic: vehicle routing with time windows is NP-hard, so past a handful of stops there’s no way to check every possible combination in reasonable time. The algorithm explores the solution space, keeps improving on what it finds, and stops when it converges or its search window runs out, the same class of technique used inside most commercial routing engines, just not metered by task count.
Is it really free
Is there a catch? Not one I’m hiding. I built this to document converting a set of Excel-based operations research models, work I’ve done professionally for twenty-plus years, into standalone web tools, and to write about the process. It runs on a small Render instance, not a funded SaaS business, so there’s no task-based pricing waiting in the wings. If that ever changes, I’ll say so here.
What it isn’t
This tool solves the optimization problem itself: which vehicle visits which stop, in what order, respecting time windows and capacity. It does not include a driver mobile app, live GPS tracking, proof-of-delivery capture, customer SMS notifications, or dispatcher chat, the operational layer Onfleet is actually built around. There’s also a hard cap on solve time: every run gets a maximum of 2 minutes (120 seconds) of search, you can dial it down, never up. That’s comfortably enough for a delivery run in the dozens-to-couple-hundred-stops range; push well past that and the solver returns its best plan when the clock runs out rather than a proven-optimal one, with any stop it can’t fit flagged rather than silently dropped. If your business needs the full delivery-management stack, or you’re routing at a scale a 2-minute solve can’t comfortably handle, Onfleet’s price may be justified. If what you need is the routing math without the $599/month floor, that’s the gap this fills.
Who this actually fits
Who actually fits where: if what you need is the routing math, time windows, vehicle capacity, real drive times, without a $599/month floor, this covers it for free. If your operation needs driver apps, live tracking, proof of delivery, and dispatcher chat as part of one platform, Onfleet’s plans are built for that whole stack, and the price reflects it.
A few common questions
Is there a stop or task limit? No cap tied to billing, but there is a hard cap on search time (2 minutes, see above), which functions as a practical limit on problem size, not a plan tier you have to upgrade past. The demo dataset runs 113 stops across 10 vehicles comfortably inside that window.
Does it handle multiple vehicles with different capacities? Yes, that’s a core part of the model: each vehicle in the workbook gets its own capacity and cost, and the solver won’t overload one truck while another runs empty.
What about SMS notifications to customers, like Onfleet offers? This tool doesn’t send anything to end customers, it only produces the optimized route plan. If customer-facing tracking and notifications matter to your operation, that’s a real feature Onfleet has and this tool doesn’t try to replicate.
Do I need to know how to code? No. The whole interaction is upload a workbook (or paste a Sheets link), click run, and download the results. The Python and OR-Tools code runs behind the scenes; you never see or touch it unless you want to.
Try it
Download the sample workbook and run your own stops through it. For the engineering behind the solver, time windows, capacity, the metaheuristic search, see Why Google OR-Tools and Not the Excel Solver You Already Know. I ran the same comparison for three other platforms: a RouteXL alternative, a Route4Me alternative, and a Routific alternative.
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