Free delivery route planner for small business
No account No cost No sales call For the owner-operator or small crew doing their own deliveries — one to a few vehicles, not a fleet department.
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
Owner-operator delivery runs
One driver, one vehicle, a real optimized order instead of a guess based on which stop is closest next.
Florists & bakeries
Time-sensitive orders with a delivery window per customer.
Dry cleaning delivery
A recurring weekly route across regular customers plus one-off pickups.
Pool & lawn service
Sequence a day's properties by drive time, not by the order they were booked.
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 small delivery run |
|---|---|
| Time windows | A customer is only home between 5 and 7pm; a shop wants deliveries before it opens. |
| Vehicle capacity | One van's worth of orders — the tool tells you if you've booked more than it can hold in one trip. |
| Route time limit | Cap how long you or your one driver are out for the day. |
| Unserved stops | If an order genuinely does not fit, it is flagged so you know to reschedule it, not silently dropped. |
| Mixed fleet | If you run two vehicles, each can have its own capacity. |
You get back an Excel file with each driver'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.
- 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 shop or home base. Every row after it is a delivery, with what it takes up (an order count or weight) and when the customer needs it.
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.
Most delivery route apps charge per driver per month, which does not make sense when you have one or two. This one does not.
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.
- Fleet route optimization — Multi-vehicle trucking and distribution fleets.
- Sales rep route planner — Outside sales reps and merchandisers visiting client sites.
- Courier routing software — Same-day and multi-stop courier services.
- 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.