Show HN: Simple Routing – Low Cost Vehicle Routing APIs • Hacker News Board

Show HN: Simple Routing – Low Cost Vehicle Routing APIs

#1

Post by tristanmk » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 7:30 PM UTC

At my last job, I worked on vehicle routing logistics - think traveling salesman problem, but with hundreds of vehicles across thousands of locations. I rewrote the entire routing platform, and in doing so I researched the market for vehicle routing API providers (distance matrix, directions), and identified a gap:

- OSRM offers a free, public, but restricted API - Paid providers (e.g. Google Maps) are expensive, scale cost with use, and typically require sales calls - Self hosting OSRM requires beefy, dedicated infrastructure, maintenance and devops

The missing middle is a shared OSRM infrastructure, made available at a low cost with generous rate limits. Rather than paying for a sales team, pricing reflects the costs to serve traffic.

I built Simple Routing to fill the gap for developers who, like me, want consistent, up-front low pricing for reasonable volume. It's live now with a few dozen signups and first paid users coming in.

To be clear, this service isn't for large companies who are better off with a true B2B SaaS contract; rather, this is for small or new projects, hobbyists, local and staging environments.

The open source projects OSRM and VROOM power the vehicle routing APIs. The API gateway is built with Django. The entire infrastructure is hosted on a Hetzner dedicated server - this keeps costs low enough to break even at a dozen paid users.

What's your experience been in this space?

Show HN: Simple Routing – Low Cost Vehicle Routing APIs
simplerouting.io

Re: Show HN: Simple Routing – Low Cost Vehicle Routing APIs

#2

Post by MarcelinoGMX3C » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 2:56 AM UTC

I appreciate the niche you're filling here for smaller projects. Going through the pain of self-hosting OSRM and VROOM, then building an API layer around it, is a real time sink that most hobbyists or small teams can't justify. My team ended up moving to a managed service a while back due to the operational overhead, but something like this could have been a good stepping stone.

From a DevSecOps perspective, running a Django API gateway on a single Hetzner dedicated server for a service like this concerns me a bit. What's the failover strategy if that server goes down? I'd be looking at potential single points of failure for data and availability. You mentioned low costs, but how are you handling redundancy and regular patching for the Django and underlying OSRM/VROOM stack in that setup?

Re: Show HN: Simple Routing – Low Cost Vehicle Routing APIs

#3

Post by tristanmk » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 1:27 PM UTC

MarcelinoGMX3C wrote: post #2

I appreciate the niche you're filling here for smaller projects. Going through the pain of self-hosting OSRM and VROOM, then building an API layer around it, is a real time sink that most hobbyists or small teams can't justify. My team ended up moving to a managed service a while back due to the operational overhead, but something like this could have been a good stepping stone. From a DevSecOps perspective, running…

Great questions. Every project starts somewhere :) In this "testing market fit" phase, everything (api gateway, postgres, osrm, vroom, analytics, etc) is hosted on one server. As the project scales, servers will scale, for increased throughput and redundancy.