Free route optimization for courier services
No account No cost No sales call Plan a run of pickups or drop-offs back to one hub, inside each stop's pickup or delivery window.
Nothing to sign up for. Open the tool, download the sample workbook, replace the sample stops with yours, and run it.
Open the route optimizer Download the sample workbookWho this is for
Same-day document couriers
Sequence a batch of pickups across a city back to one processing point or office.
Small parcel courier services
Cap how many packages one courier can carry per run.
Medical specimen pickup routes
Collect from multiple clinics or offices and bring everything to one lab, inside each site's pickup window.
Local errand & delivery services
One driver covering a mixed batch of stops in one loop instead of backtracking.
What it actually does
This is a vehicle routing problem (VRP) solver — the same class of model commercial routing software runs, using Google OR-Tools and real road drive times from OSRM, not straight-line distances.
| Constraint | What it means for a courier run |
|---|---|
| Time windows | A clinic only releases specimens between 2 and 4pm; an office closes at 5. |
| Vehicle capacity | Cap how many pickups or packages one courier's vehicle can carry before it must return to the hub. |
| Route time limit | Cap how long a courier is out on a single run. |
| Unserved stops | A pickup that cannot be fit into the run within its window is flagged as dropped, not silently skipped. |
| Mixed fleet | Bikes, cars and vans can each have their own capacity and speed factor in the same run. |
You get back an Excel file with each courier's stop sequence and arrival times, plus an interactive map of the routes.
What it does not do
Being straight about the limits, so nobody wastes an afternoon:
- It is not live dispatch. It plans a day up front. It does not re-route mid-shift when a request comes in.
- There is no driver app. You hand out the route sheet or paste stops into a phone map yourself.
- No live traffic. Drive times are typical road times, not current conditions.
- Single trip, single depot. It plans one load per vehicle from one starting point — it does not model a vehicle returning to reload mid-route.
- No point-to-point pairing. Every stop routes to or from the one hub you set as the depot — it does not pair a specific pickup to its own separate drop-off address (the way a rideshare or package-exchange courier job works). That needs a different model than this one runs today.
- It runs to a time limit, so on very large problems it returns the best route set it found in that window, not a proven optimum.
Your data
The workbook you upload is read in memory and is not saved to the server.
But be aware of what does leave: to get real drive times, the coordinates of your stops are sent to the public OSRM routing service, and the resulting travel-time matrix is cached on the server under a hash of those coordinates. If you paste street addresses instead of coordinates, those addresses are sent to the US Census geocoder and/or OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service.
How to start
1. Get the template
Download the sample workbook. It has four sheets: locations, vehicles, parameters, solution.
2. Put your day in it
The first data row of locations is your hub or processing point. Every row after it is a pickup or drop-off stop, with its window.
3. Upload and run
Drop the file on the optimizer and hit run. Results come back as a map plus a workbook you can print or share.
If your Excel columns are named differently: on the locations sheet, rename them to match the sample — those are read by name. On the vehicles sheet, columns are read by position, so keep them in the sample’s exact order.
Why it is free
I am an operations research analyst. I spent twenty years building optimization models inside Excel for manufacturers and airlines, where they stayed locked in spreadsheets nobody else could open. I have been converting them into free web tools one at a time and writing up how each conversion went.
Courier dispatch platforms bundle routing with live tracking and billing, priced accordingly. This is just the routing piece.
Questions, or an input format that does not fit? Email mario@kindoflost.com. I read them.
Other routing use cases
Same solver and engine, different worked example — each of these is written for its own setting. Start from whichever is closest to yours.
- Food banks & food rescue — Home-delivery and donor-pickup routing for volunteer drivers.
- Excel Solver alternative — For when Excel Solver or SolverStudio can’t handle the problem size anymore.
- Spreadsheet-in, spreadsheet-out — Upload an Excel file of stops, get back a routed workbook and a map.
- Open-source vehicle routing — What’s actually free — the Google OR-Tools engine behind this and most routing tools.
- Last-mile delivery routing — Parcel and package delivery, per-van capacity and time windows.
- Field service routing — Technician appointment windows, job duration, and per-tech capacity.
- Delivery route planner — For small businesses running their own delivery routes.
- Fleet route optimization — Multi-vehicle trucking and distribution fleets.
- Sales rep route planner — Outside sales reps and merchandisers visiting client sites.
- Waste & recycling collection routing — Truck capacity and collection time windows.
Related
- Route optimizer — the tool itself, with the full parameter reference.
- Optimizador de rutas — Spanish version.
- Kind-of-Lost — write-ups of each model, including how this one was built.