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Show HN: Bike route planner that follows almost only official bike trails

trailimap.com

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Re: Show HN: Bike route planner that follows almost only official bike trails

#71

Post by asdff »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #56
verelo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting assumption. My mind goes to to a) Most people are mobile first and b) In this category of app, i imagine people want the route with them on their phone as they bike (as they're probably unfamiliar with the route, hence the need to plan it) Cool idea, i'd love to try it but honestly i'd love it on my phone for the aforementioned reasons! --- Edit: Some follow up remarks (From Chrome on a Mac) 1. I found it…

>a) Most people are mobile first I couldn't imagine trying to build a complex route on a tiny screen with a crappy phone UI. I am starting to feel like an old man yelling at clouds here. Why in the hell wouldn't you prefer to use a nice monitor with a mouse for a complex task like this?

Because you might plan a route while already out on your bike

Re: Show HN: Bike route planner that follows almost only official bike trails

#72

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #52
Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #7

Nice! I added a similar feature to cycle.travel (my site) a few months back. 5% of the work was writing the code to route only on waymarked routes, 95% was writing code to "heal" the accidental breaks in OSM bike route data...

Your site doesn't appear to have waypoints? As an avid cyclist, I couldn't imagine just using some calculated route between two points. I ride for fun, not transportation.

Sure, you can add up to 200 waypoints - if you want to do that via the old-school click-click-click there’s a toggle, or you can just drag the route. I ride for fun too which is why I built a routeplanner that likes quiet and scenic roads!

Re: Show HN: Bike route planner that follows almost only official bike trails

#73

Post by INTPenis »

Not bad! I'm an avid bike camper and I just tried creating a route through Sweden and it does a pretty good job. We are a bit spoilt for choice here with bicycle routes.

The only feature I'd want is to be able to print the route on paper maps. I wonder if print CSS could be used to create pages of the whole route.

Re: Show HN: Bike route planner that follows almost only official bike trails

#74

Post by wnc3141 »

cullenking wrote: post #69

Nice work! I run ridewithgps.com and am responsible for all our mapping and routing. If you ever want to pick my brain about anything related to bike software, and of course grapphopper / vector tiles, feel free to reach out, email is in my profile. I'm actually about to dive into fixing up some custom graphhopper routing profiles today for some new route planner updates we are about to release!

You are doing the lord's work. I love this website! - particularly that it preserves an in progress route when I exit and return to my planning session.

Re: Show HN: Bike route planner that follows almost only official bike trails

#75

Post by dx-800 »

cullenking wrote: post #68
wintermutestwin wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since this is getting downvoted, I'd sure like to hear why you think an app like this justifies a $10/mo sub.

I didn't downvote you FYI, but to answer your question, I run ridewithgps and as a result have a pretty in depth understanding of all the costs involved. We have 14 machines in a rack at a datacenter in PDX, and have focused on low hosting costs since we have historically been bootstrapped and margin sensitive. Redundant switches, 2 firewall/load balancers, 4 compute machines, 3 database machines, 5 storage servers.…

Thanks for your interesting comment. I'm a happy customer of ridewithgps, and run a small B2B SaaS, so I love hearing details like this.

One comment: I hope you don't start emphasizing the "social media" aspects, like Strava has done, to their detriment, in my opinion. That's what prompted me to finally delete my Strava account (after uploading my thousands of activities to ridewithgps.)

Re: Show HN: Bike route planner that follows almost only official bike trails

#76

Post by clementmas »

cullenking wrote: post #69

Nice work! I run ridewithgps.com and am responsible for all our mapping and routing. If you ever want to pick my brain about anything related to bike software, and of course grapphopper / vector tiles, feel free to reach out, email is in my profile. I'm actually about to dive into fixing up some custom graphhopper routing profiles today for some new route planner updates we are about to release!

It’s nice to see so many founders here. I run travelmap.net and I can also help out with self-hosting custom map tiles or tracing itineraries on Mapbox/Maplibre maps.

Re: Show HN: Bike route planner that follows almost only official bike trails

#77

Post by kemotep »

cullenking wrote: post #68
wintermutestwin wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since this is getting downvoted, I'd sure like to hear why you think an app like this justifies a $10/mo sub.

I didn't downvote you FYI, but to answer your question, I run ridewithgps and as a result have a pretty in depth understanding of all the costs involved. We have 14 machines in a rack at a datacenter in PDX, and have focused on low hosting costs since we have historically been bootstrapped and margin sensitive. Redundant switches, 2 firewall/load balancers, 4 compute machines, 3 database machines, 5 storage servers.…

Always great to see a successful “Single Rack of Failure” project out in the wild. And I don’t mean this as a negative. By being able to contain and control all the business into a single rack, you can more easily set up redundancy than trying to replicate your AWS environment between availability zones or worst, try recreating it in Azure or Google with all the different services, footguns, and so on. Just get another rack in a different datacenter and you’re set.

Congratulations to your team on keeping costs low and running a successful business out of a single rack.

Re: Show HN: Bike route planner that follows almost only official bike trails

#78

Post by wintermutestwin »

cullenking wrote: post #68
wintermutestwin wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since this is getting downvoted, I'd sure like to hear why you think an app like this justifies a $10/mo sub.

I didn't downvote you FYI, but to answer your question, I run ridewithgps and as a result have a pretty in depth understanding of all the costs involved. We have 14 machines in a rack at a datacenter in PDX, and have focused on low hosting costs since we have historically been bootstrapped and margin sensitive. Redundant switches, 2 firewall/load balancers, 4 compute machines, 3 database machines, 5 storage servers.…

I sincerely appreciate your serious answer to my serious question. I am quite surprised at all these costs considering that OSM is free, but you explained them very thoroughly and I am impressed. You have adequately justified the subscription requirement.

This post, combined with the fact that your planner actually allows me to force a path has won me as a customer. I'll also note that setting your yearly at 75% of the monthly is wise considering very low winter time usage.

For me, churn or not is going to come down to whether I can read critical details on your mobile app without having to put reading glasses on. (which is a factor that not even a $2t company like Apple can address properly)

Re: Show HN: Bike route planner that follows almost only official bike trails

#79

Post by wintermutestwin »

vanilla_nut wrote: post #65
wintermutestwin wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since this is getting downvoted, I'd sure like to hear why you think an app like this justifies a $10/mo sub.

I've used ridewithGPS for multiple bike tours, the longest being a full month of unsupported riding. I also use it to scout out routes when I want to create a new ride somewhere in my area on roads I don't know already. ridwithGPS has a few features that really stand out, IMO: * excellent, almost entirely bug-free routing on mobile * heatmap data, because maps aren't entirely up-to-date * multiple map styles, so you…

>frequent router over unfrequented trails and dirt roads in the mountains around me

This is me as well. Thanks much for your perspective, it was helpful in me making the decision to jump in.

I do like the idea of supporting products and services that are staving off enshitificaiton.

Re: Show HN: Bike route planner that follows almost only official bike trails

#80

Post by cullenking »

kemotep wrote: post #77
cullenking wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't downvote you FYI, but to answer your question, I run ridewithgps and as a result have a pretty in depth understanding of all the costs involved. We have 14 machines in a rack at a datacenter in PDX, and have focused on low hosting costs since we have historically been bootstrapped and margin sensitive. Redundant switches, 2 firewall/load balancers, 4 compute machines, 3 database machines, 5 storage servers.…

Always great to see a successful “Single Rack of Failure” project out in the wild. And I don’t mean this as a negative. By being able to contain and control all the business into a single rack, you can more easily set up redundancy than trying to replicate your AWS environment between availability zones or worst, try recreating it in Azure or Google with all the different services, footguns, and so on. Just get anoth…

We are just about finished with a total hoist into a self-hosted k8s cluster. We've gone slow due to my concerns about k8s and the additional complexity, but it's actually been pretty smooth and enjoyable. The end goal is the ability to point our helm charts at any cloud provider and have the entire infra stood up in less than a day. We already do offsite backups to rsync.net. We don't need crazy redundancy and are OK with a certain amount of risk to availability and I have been enjoying this on-prem renaissance that we've seen over the last couple of years, makes my stubbornness around self-hosting feel smart in hindsight ;)
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