If you’ve tried to get a straight price out of Route4Me, you’ve probably hit a “contact sales” button instead of a number. That’s the most common complaint I hear, and it’s usually why people start searching for a route4me alternative in the first place. I’ve spent twenty-plus years building routing and scheduling optimization for a living, so I built a free one for the operator who just wants to run a route, not book a demo call first.
What Route4Me actually costs
Route4Me doesn’t publish pricing on its own site anymore. To get a number you have to talk to sales, and the model is billed per user, per month, meaning dispatchers, managers, and every driver logged into the app all count against your bill. Third-party pricing trackers report figures in the $199-$349 per user per month range, though that’s not confirmed directly by Route4Me and doesn’t include marketplace add-ons. Even the free trial is inconsistent depending on where you look: some sources still list a 7-day trial, others report it’s been pulled in favor of the sales-call-first model. If pricing certainty matters to you, that ambiguity alone is worth noticing.
Why that model is hard on a small operation
None of that makes Route4Me a bad product, it’s a mature platform with a lot of fleet-management features built in. But if you’re a small operator, an owner-operator, or someone who just needs to route 15 stops for tomorrow’s deliveries, “talk to sales to find out what this costs” is a real barrier. You can’t budget for a number you don’t have, and you can’t compare tools you can’t try.
What I built instead
routing.kindoflost.com is a free vehicle routing tool built on Google OR-Tools, the same optimization library used in a lot of commercial routing software. It solves the vehicle routing problem with time windows and vehicle capacity (VRP-TW): each stop can have an earliest/latest arrival window, each vehicle has a load limit, and routes respect a daily driving-time cap. Drive times come from real road data via OSRM, not straight-line distance guesses.
You upload an Excel workbook (or paste a Google Sheets link) with your stops, vehicles, and parameters, click run, and get optimized routes on a map plus a downloadable CSV. No signup, no account, no card on file. It’s free because I built it to document an OR-Tools conversion project, not to sell seats.
A quick example
Say you run a two-truck landscaping or lawn-care crew with 30 stops split across two vehicles, each with its own service window and a capacity limit on equipment or bags of material per truck. That’s a textbook VRP-TW case: time windows, capacity, and a distance-based cost, exactly what this tool solves, and exactly the kind of small-fleet job that doesn’t justify a per-user SaaS contract.
What’s in the workbook
Everything lives in one Excel workbook: a locations sheet (lat/lon, demand, service time, arrival window), a vehicles sheet (capacity, cost), a parameters sheet, and a solution sheet for re-running from a prior result. Keep the sheet names and columns, swap in your own 30 stops and 2 trucks, upload, and run, no account required to even look at the format. Prefer Google Sheets to Excel? There’s a copyable template for that too.
How the routing math actually works
There’s no proprietary black box to take on faith here, and nothing gated behind a sales call to find out how it works. The solver is Google OR-Tools’ routing library running a guided local search metaheuristic: vehicle routing is NP-hard, so past a handful of stops there’s no way to check every possible route combination in reasonable time. The algorithm explores the solution space, keeps improving on what it finds, and returns the best plan it has when its search window closes. You can read the documentation yourself instead of taking a vendor’s word for it.
Is it really free
Is it really free, or is there a catch further down the line? No catch. I built this to document converting a set of Excel-based operations research models, the kind I’ve built professionally for twenty-plus years, into standalone web tools, and to write about the process for this blog. It runs on a small Render instance, not venture funding, so there’s no seat-based business model waiting to kick in. If that ever changes, I’ll say so here rather than let anyone find out from an invoice.
What it isn’t
I’d rather tell you the limits than let you find them yourself. This is a routing optimizer, not a full fleet-management platform: there’s no driver mobile app, no live GPS tracking, no proof-of-delivery capture, no dispatcher chat. It solves the actual math problem, which vehicle visits which stop, in what order, and hands you the plan. There’s also a hard limit on solve time: every run is capped at 2 minutes (120 seconds) of search, no exceptions, you can ask for less, never more. For a few dozen to a couple hundred stops that’s normally enough to land on a very good plan; push well past that and the solver hands back the best routes it found in that window, not a guaranteed optimum, and any stop it can’t fit gets flagged as unserved rather than forced onto an already-full truck. If you need the operational layer on top of the routing math, or you’re running networks too large for a 2-minute window, that’s a different category of tool, and Route4Me’s fuller platform may genuinely be worth the sales call for that.
Who this actually fits
Who actually fits where: if you’re routing a handful of vehicles and just want the optimization math without pricing being a mystery, this covers it for free. If you need a driver mobile app, live GPS tracking, proof-of-delivery capture, or a support line on the phone, Route4Me’s fuller platform is built for exactly that, you’ll just need to get on the sales call to find out what it costs you.
A few common questions
How many stops can it handle? The sample dataset runs 113 stops across 10 vehicles inside the 2-minute cap described above. You can tell the solver to search for less time, never more, since 120 seconds is a hard ceiling on this free instance. Very large multi-depot networks are outside what a single run is built for, but a regional route with dozens to a couple hundred stops fits comfortably.
Does it work outside the US? The demo data is a 113-stop Ohio dataset, but the underlying drive-time engine (OSRM) uses open road network data that isn’t US-only. I haven’t verified coverage or accuracy for every country, so if you’re routing outside North America, treat the results as a starting point and sanity-check them against your local map.
Can I resume from a previous solution? Yes. There’s a warm-start option: if the solution sheet has data from a prior run and the parameter is set to use it, the solver starts from there instead of from scratch.
Try it
Grab the sample workbook, swap in your own stops, and run it. If you want the engineering detail behind how the solver handles time windows and capacity constraints, I wrote about that in Why Google OR-Tools and Not the Excel Solver You Already Know. I also put together the same comparison for three other routing platforms: a RouteXL alternative, an Onfleet alternative, and a Routific alternative, if one of those is the one you’re actually shopping against.
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