[ollybee]

What I really want form a bike route planner is a map style that shows smaller roads as you zoom out. When planning a cycling I'm interested in tiny back back roads but they are hidden as soon as I zoom out on any map enough to be useful for route planning.

[qrohlf]

Not sure if you're looking for paved or unpaved backroads, but if it's the latter I recently shipped a feature at my day job (https://ridewithgps.com) that highlights all unpaved backroads, visible up to zoom level 8 (above zoom 8 we start running into tile size/data limitations).

May be useful to you or others in this thread. We lean pretty heavily into the "cycling power user" market segment, the feature set isn't always the most discoverable but it's quite comprehensive if you put in the up-front time to learn the tooling (similar to a lot of other specialty mapping apps out there - caltopo, fatmap (rip) etc)

[wintermutestwin]

A subscription? $10 a month?? That's the cost of a music streaming service!!

I'd spend up to a $100 once on a killer tool that meets all my needs in this space.

This subscription first crap is way out of hand.

[insane_dreamer]

Except that if you're a serious cyclist, spending $10/month on a really good road mapping service is worth more to you than spending $10/month on a music streaming service (or 2 coffees at Starbucks).

[Moru]

Don't compare RWGPS to Starbucks please... The coffee isn't really worth that kind of money. But $10 is a lot in different parts of the world. For me that is more than what I pay for my mobile internet connection that works out in the nowhere.

[insane_dreamer]

> But $10 is a lot in different parts of the world

of course; this is primarily a US audience (maybe parts of Europe)

[wintermutestwin]

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

[dx-800]

It's for serious cyclists, for whom $10 a month is barely noticeable, considering how much you can spend on the bicycling hobby. For example, I do bicycle touring, weeks-long or months-long trips every year, and the RideWithGps route planner/navigation tools are extremely useful when riding thousands of miles by yourself in places you aren't familiar with.

[vanilla_nut]

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 can pick what works best for your workflow and the country you're in

* easy GPX file export, I use it all the time with the bike computer (every day on tours)

* collection management, especially useful when I make per-day routes for a tour

* a healthy trial period so you can actually test it out and learn it

Basically it's just an excellent app (and site) that works reliably across every supported platform, that isn't full of spammy upselling garbage, that is clearly made by a competent team of developers who care deeply about the product they make.

Every tech product should be made like this. A lot of tech products used to be like this before enshittification really took off in the last 5-10 years.

I'm more than happy to support a great product like this, as a bicycle tourist and frequent router over unfrequented trails and dirt roads in the mountains around me. For road riders in cities, it's probably a whole lot less useful. But there are a lot of bicycle riding use cases outside of 'road riders in cities' :-)

[wintermutestwin]

>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.

[carlosjobim]

$10 per month is the minimum price that you should use for any software or digital product. People who are unwilling to pay $10 per month are also unwilling to pay $5 per month or $1 per month – regardless of how much value they get from the product. Ten dollars is the bottom.

Why should it be a subscription instead of a pay-once app? Maps have to update as the real world updates, and probably they have other features that can't be on-device.

[Moru]

$10 per month might be the minimum price that is acceptable in US. This looks very different depending on your salary and if you can choose not to pay tax for health care and such. Have seen cases where different prices for different areas in the world when I was younger, not sure how that looks now.

I'm paying for $1 and $5 subscriptions (ko-fi) for things I like and use. But $10 is getting too high for a thing even though I use it every day. Within five months I'm already past the value of my bike. I need that money to change parts to be able to continue biking.

What I ususally do is a one-month subscription to support. Then I turn it off for the rest of the year.

[carlosjobim]

You are the exception. Very few people who wouldn't pay $10 would pay $5 or $1, no matter which region. If your salary level makes $10 an important amount of money, then priorities should be food, shelter and such. And if you need five months to save up for bike parts, then you have to urgently try to fix your economic situation, before you put your own health and future at risk.

[macintux]

I think your price analysis is predicated on the amount of friction.

For me to sign up with a 3rd party service to pay a subscription: yes, $10/month is probably the smallest fee I'd bother with.

To add a subscription through my Apple devices, where I can manage my apps in a single pane of glass and start/stop subscriptions at will, I'm fine with paying $10/year, $2/month, whatever.

[cullenking]

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. Single upstream network provider, about to be two sometime next year. Rack space + power + redundant network is about $3500 a month. Machines have an average service life of about 5 years.

Database machines cost about $45k for a set of three.

Storing user data is non-trivial - GPS track files add up when you get close to a billion of them, photos are also very large. We use a self-hosted ceph object storage cluster of 5 machines, about $100k of hardware. it's cheaper than 20k a month in S3 bills.

Our rack all-in is probably about $250k of equipment. 5 year service life, probably $5k a month amortized out. So, doing things as cheap as possible (I buy nvme SSDs for storage cluster off ebay, and am about to buy a couple arista 100gbe switches from ebay as well) we are somewhere around $8500 a month on hosting.

We use both google maps as well as self-hosted OSM based map and routing services. About half our map usage goes to google, by user preference, and we pay them about $20,000 per month for that. Our self-hosted OSM map stuff require 1tb of ram, fast disks, a ton of CPU cores. We host 10 different planet scale routing profiles via graphhopper, which take 3 days to build every week with updated data. They also host a vector maps stack which is much more efficient, taking about 3 hours a week to build.

My last estimate of an AWS bill for all the above was $30k a month, assuming some discounts. We have grown since then and I'd napkin us to be > $40k a month at this point.

We strive to minimize any costs for third party platforms. We do use amplitude for analytics, that's > $30k a year at this point. We do use an external email service for easy marketing emails, but the majority of our millions of emails a month are sent from our own mail servers, using an in-house system we made a decade ago that still works well. We try to minimize vendor lockin and costs, where it makes sense.

Most expensive part of the entire company of course is salaries, with of course an eye to developer and related salaries. We run pretty bare bones where possible, with a flat management structure with minimal overhead. Our total staff size is 32, of which 6 are full-time end user support.

A bit of a ramble, sorry, but there's a large amount of overhead to run a system like ours. We don't just make a one-time use desktop application, we have to continually provide storage and compute for all users. If we stopped that, the entire service would fall apart. So yes, a subscription makes sense in a case like ours. You can't do what we do with a desktop app. Plus, the entire world has switched to mobile for this sort of consumer application, which is an entire rat race of it's own. You can't just release a single purchase app and expect it to be maintained, it's a massive effort to keep up with mobile development just to maintain features, much less build anything new.

[wintermutestwin]

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)

[cullenking]

Unfortunately we still have work to do there. We have dabbled in a separate map style, but it's really difficult to get any roadnames to show up when you start increasing font sizes in map styles. It's a sort of pick-your-poison - big maps where you can see the roads with almost no road names, or maps with smaller details with road names. The app itself should mostly scale well with increased system font sizes, but we are still carving out a couple of webviews in the app which have funky behavior. I do like to joke that with our average staff age passing 40 in the next year or two, we'll solve all readability issues....

[dx-800]

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.)

[kemotep]

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.

[cullenking]

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 < 1 day of data loss. Only thing that would take a long time is some GIS search data. We use elasticsearch and h3 hex strings encoded to guarantee prefix searching works for different zoom levels, which is a couple terabytes of derived data that takes a while to compute.

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 ;)

[Moru]

You forget one thing. RWGPS is (I think) one of the few training apps that can record and display all the data on the free tier. And it doesn't nag you every 5 minutes to upgrade to Pro or whatever. I really appreciate that and try to buy a one-month subscription once per year when I can afford it.

I have also worked with gps data and run my own map server (for a small country) so I know it costs money, time and effort. And thanks for the breakdown!

[Doctor_Fegg]

cycle.travel (my site) aims to do that - the advantage of developing your own cartography! Minor roads in rural areas are shown earlier than in most other styles, but in urban areas they kick in later to avoid cluttering the map too much.

[RankingMember]

Just wanted to pop in and let you know I use your site all the time and it's still the best (and I've tried everything) at creating routes to avoid dangerous roads. Thank you for the awesome app.

One little feature that's great is the quick link to view Google Streetview images, and the only thing I'd change is to have it let me do that anywhere on the map (not just on the route) so that I can look at alternatives without dragging the route there first.

[113]

It's a good app, I was happy to subscribe once I used it a couple of times to find new routes about the city.

[hn_user82179]

is that your site? I love it! I used it on an 800 mile bike ride 2 years go.

[Moru]

Wow, first bike router that chooses the same route I would to and from work. The others all take the steepest hill in the area instead of the slightly longer around the hill.

[qwertox]

OpenTopoMap is what solves that issue for me. The contrast on that map is excellent.

It's a mostly a style for OSM with hillshading applied. The Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg is hosting a web-based "preview" of it at https://opentopomap.org. https://brouter.de/brouter-web and https://bikerouter.de also have it as a selectable map layer, and it can also be added to OsmAnd.

[topher515]

This is sort of what the Strava "heatmap" map is when you switch it to cycling mode: https://www.strava.com/maps/global-heatmap?sport=Ride&style=....

[jMyles]

Yep. This is the a crucial cycling feature that's missing.

Ideally, I'd also like to highlight roads with diverters, circles, chicanes, bumps, tables, etc.

[david-gpu]

In OpenStreetMap, which is the data source used by most of these navigation apps, the relevant key is traffic_calming.

I have not found any navigation app that preferentially chooses streets with traffic_calming features, such as speed humps. I recently suggested that in OSMAnd and got no traction [0].

[0] https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues/21320

[pajko]

Have you tried https://brouter.de/ ? If that feature is neither supported here, it worth trying to request it.

[jMyles]

Interesting - I'd love to know more about this, and perhaps assist with the data model.

While purpose-built traffic calming infra is super nice to have, I'm somewhat more interested in the much more prevalent (at least, outside Europe and Asia) and also muc less expensive roadways which are traffic-calm by default, owing to natural chicanes, unimproved areas, one-lane bridges, etc.

Bogota, for example, has a fairly elegant network of unimproved roads connecting the parks. If you take a ride with a local, you see the bike infra much more acutely than what is expressed on gmaps, or even theoretically by looking at `traffic_calming==true`. A much more granular data type is required.