other than that, I don't think any serious person would trust a ralph-loop to accomplish something truly substantial. it's good for ensuring rote tasks get completed without the agent stopping too soon, but not much more

regarding (1), yes, you keep the routes you made even after your subscription ends. the limits revert to the free tier so if it had more waypoints or was longer than that then you just can't add or move waypoints. removing waypoints to get back down below the limit works and you still export your trip to formats included in your tier (e.g. google/apple/waze)

you could absolutely pay for a month just to plan and export all your trips for the year, bookmarking them with google maps or saving the files for your GPS for instance -- not a problem. I am currently exploring alternatives to monthly & annual subscription schedules to further support seasonal usage, too

per your 2nd question, that's correct, only the creator needs to pay to have 2+ collaborators. you can try it out on the free tier with 1 person at first to see if it works for you. if you just want to share maps publicly you can do that without subscribing, too

I will make a native iOS app, but probably only after this summer roadtrip season passes. as far as CarPlay goes, I'll have to find a way to test that first (all my cars/bikes have "dumb" head units). I have the site added to my homescreen on my iPhone and it works for me at least, same thing on desktop I installed the PWA with Chrome and have it in my dock

you're right that other providers don't understand through-waypoints. it's more problematic for groups than individuals, but I haven't wanted to take on live navigation yet because it's so hard to do right and to do real world testing. I could just trust Mapbox to be good enough with their Directions API, but then I'm not adding that much value and so I'm still going with planning/collaborating as my primary focus and encouraging folks to export to google/apple maps or their GPS for now. thanks for all the suggestions!

I got increasingly frustrated looking for a replacement that I made https://plotalong.app in my spare time so that my wife and I could plan and save our motorcycle trips together. We still have to add the occasional “via” waypoint but it’s leagues better than Google maps at sticking to the scenic route

I need to update the marketing site and get new users into the map faster, but if you want a quick way in here’s an actual trip I took last year and spruced up to serve as a demo https://plotalong.app/maps/5c735b43-cb84-5a7b-8976-2d4e0c383...

New features and improvements come out regularly so if you have any suggestions send me a message

a chainsaw is a coarse tool and I liken it to vibe coding. you maintain at least some level of control, but the edges are rough and you might slice off more (or less) than you meant to. I want to model my usage more like a table saw, a precision instrument that can make the exact cut just as I planned it

In terms of velocity, let me offer some numbers. In 6 months I generated >150k lines of code and merged 10k PRs to ship and iterate on https://plotalong.app

I follow best practices and isolate agents to continuously deployed dev environments, semi-manually review PRs and gate the release process between multiple protected envs. The project is getting close to 500 end-to-end tests in Playwright.

That’s just working nights and weekends. Before AI, it took my team at the office 4 years to produce this much work. There are some qualitative differences but the speed and results are real

I like your emoji suggestion. I realized little while ago I need to distinguish between different types of waypoints so this is great validation

I think you’re right about getting people into the actual app faster, before signup. I’ll have to prioritize that sooner than later

The idea is everyone opens the same route for coordinating and there’s just one source of truth for the group. And then when you’re all about to hit the road, everyone can use the nav app they’re already familiar with (or that’s built into their vehicle)

I will tackle the navigation aspect at some point if I do keep up on feature dev, though!

I got to the MVP state which was useful for my personal use case in about a month. I took it further than that as a learning exercise and as a means to share it with others. Some features that came later are live cursors (like Figma), elevation chart and grade overlay, and QR-code enabled collaboration links to make in-person sharing simple.

Check it out! https://plotalong.app

Figuring out the exact UI/UX I wanted was the hardest part. I did the branding myself, handdrawn on paper, traced in Procreate, and vectored in Sketch. Fast iterations and a good test suite made it possible to try lots of different approaches and refine the one I liked the most. There are roughly 4000 unit tests and over 300 e2e tests that run on multiple environments with fully automated CI/CD.

I’m using Mapbox for the frontend and the whole app is basically just a monolithic Cloudflare Worker. Claude pretty much implemented the entire thing. I got a lot of mileage out of self hosting a Gitea project and recording all my planning sessions as Milestones and Issues. Claude has his own account without admin privileges. The process of managing a team of agents to build this practically autonomously was a bit jaw dropping and eye opening to be honest.

I would love to hear from other pleasure & sport drivers about the features they use or want the most in a routing app. I have an Android app in Play Store review, if you’d like to be an early access tester shoot me an email at my handle @plotalong.app