Free route optimization for last-mile delivery
No account No cost No sales call Plan a day of parcel or package stops across the vans you have, respecting each customer's 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
Regional parcel carriers
Split a day's manifest across the vans you actually have, instead of a fixed zip-code split that ignores drive time.
E-commerce home delivery
Sequence residential stops so a dense neighborhood gets grouped instead of crossed back and forth.
Furniture & appliance delivery
Two-person crews with a scheduled delivery window per household and a real capacity limit per truck.
Grocery & meal delivery
Keep a route short enough that the last stop still gets a cold delivery.
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 delivery day |
|---|---|
| Time windows | A customer only accepts delivery between 2pm and 6pm; a business address closes at 5. |
| Vehicle capacity | A cargo van carries 60 packages, a box truck carries 200. Track weight or pallet count as a separate limit if you need to. |
| Route time limit | Cap how long any one driver's shift runs — not just distance, but total time on the road. |
| Unserved stops | A stop that genuinely cannot be reached in time is flagged as dropped, not silently forced in. |
| Mixed fleet | Vans and box trucks can have different capacities and speed factors in the same solve. |
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 depot or warehouse. Every row after it is a delivery stop, with its package count (or weight) and delivery 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.
Last-mile routing is one of the categories where paid software prices hardest — per van, per month, with a demo call in front of it. There is no paywall here and no plan to add one for this use.
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.
- 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.
- 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.