Routific already gives away a real free tier, up to 100 orders a month, full feature set, unlimited drivers and dispatchers, no watered-down trial version. That’s more generous than most routing software, and if you’re small enough to stay under that ceiling, you may not need a routific alternative at all. This is for what happens after: the day you cross 100 orders and the invoice starts attaching a per-order cost.
What Routific charges once you outgrow the free tier
Past 100 orders a month, Routific moves to paid pricing: roughly $150/month for up to 1,000 orders, then a per-order rate after that, reported around 15 cents per order down to 3 cents per stop at the highest volumes. Third-party estimates put a team running 3,000 orders/month at roughly $410/month, and a team at 10,000 orders/month around $870/month. Those are estimates, not an official quote, but the shape is clear: the cost scales directly with how much routing you do.
No cap, but no per-order cost either
routing.kindoflost.com solves the same kind of problem, vehicle routing with time windows and capacity constraints (VRP-TW), using Google OR-Tools and real drive times pulled from OSRM instead of straight-line estimates. Upload an Excel workbook or a Google Sheets link, run it, and get routes on a map plus a CSV to download. There’s no order counter and no per-stop fee, whether you’re routing 80 stops or 800 this month.
A quick example
Say you run a courier company that just crossed 100 orders a month across three drivers, each with a delivery window and a load limit per van. That’s the exact moment Routific’s free tier stops applying and the per-order meter starts running. It’s also a textbook VRP-TW case, time windows, vehicle capacity, real drive times, which this tool solves at no cost, whether you’re at 101 orders or 10,100.
What’s in the workbook
Everything goes into 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 for warm-starting from a prior run. Whether that’s 90 orders or 900, it’s the same four sheets and the same zero cost. Google Sheets works too, if you’d rather paste a link than upload a file.
How the routing math actually works
The order-based billing is Routific’s pricing choice, not a reflection of how much computation routing actually takes. Underneath, this tool uses Google OR-Tools’ routing library with 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 route combination in reasonable time. The solver explores the solution space, keeps improving on what it finds, and returns its best plan when its search window ends, the same general class of approach used inside most commercial routing platforms, Routific included, just running here without a per-order meter attached.
Is it really free
Is it really free with no order cap, ever? Yes, on this tool specifically. I built it to document converting a set of Excel-based operations research models, work I’ve done professionally for twenty-plus years, into standalone web apps, and to write about the process. It runs on a small Render instance rather than a funded SaaS business, so there’s no per-order pricing waiting to phase in once you’re hooked.
What it isn’t
Fair comparison means being upfront about the trade-off. Routific is a full day-to-day route management platform: dispatch, driver communication, customer notifications, and a dashboard built for running routing operations continuously. This tool is a single-solve optimizer, you upload data, run the solver, and download a plan. There’s no driver app, no live tracking, no ongoing dispatch dashboard. It also comes with a real limit of its own: every solve is hard-capped at 2 minutes (120 seconds) of search time, you can ask for less, never more. That’s plenty for a daily run in the dozens-to-couple-hundred-stops range most small operators actually have; push well beyond that and, like any time-boxed solver, it returns the best plan found in that window rather than a proven optimum, flagging any stops it couldn’t fit rather than quietly overloading a route. It’s built for planning and batch routing, not for running daily delivery operations end to end. If you need the full operational platform, or you’re routing at a scale beyond what a 2-minute solve handles well, and you’re past the free 100 orders, Routific’s paid tiers may still be the right call.
Who this actually fits
Who actually fits where: if you’re comfortable staying under 100 orders a month, Routific’s own free tier is genuinely a good deal and you don’t need to look elsewhere. If you’ve outgrown that and don’t want your bill to climb with every order, this tool covers the same routing math for free, permanently, with no volume ceiling. If you need the full day-to-day dispatch platform on top of the routing math, Routific’s paid tiers still make sense, that operational layer is real value, and this tool doesn’t try to replace it. Plenty of small operators run both: Routific (or this tool) for the weekly route plan, and a separate lightweight process for driver communication on the day.
A few common questions
Is there really no order limit? Correct, not on this tool, though there is the 2-minute search cap described above, which is a runtime limit tied to problem size and complexity, not a monthly order quota. The sample dataset runs 113 stops across 10 vehicles comfortably inside that window.
Does it re-optimize automatically as new orders come in during the day, like Routific’s dashboard can? No. This is a batch tool: you upload a workbook, run it once, and get a plan back. If you need continuous re-optimization as orders arrive throughout the day, that’s the operational layer Routific’s paid product provides.
Can I keep using Google Sheets instead of Excel? Yes, there’s a Sheets template you can copy and paste the link into directly, no download/upload round trip needed.
Do I need to know how to code to use it? No. You upload a workbook or paste a Sheets link, click run, and download a map and CSV. The OR-Tools solver runs behind the scenes; there’s nothing to configure in Python unless you want to look under the hood.
Try it
Pull the sample workbook and run your own stop list through it. For how the solver handles time windows and vehicle capacity under the hood, see Why Google OR-Tools and Not the Excel Solver You Already Know. I wrote the same comparison for three other platforms: a RouteXL alternative, a Route4Me alternative, and an Onfleet alternative.
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