Health, home and travel decision
Roadtrippers
A competent developer can build a usable trip planner (search, map, routing, save/export) in about a week and host it cheaply; reproducing Roadtrippers' Autopilot, POI scale, and partner/member features requires proprietary data and partnerships, so keeping the paid product is reasonable for those features.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need — the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship.
What a replacement has to do
- Create and edit a routed trip by searching POIs, placing stops on a map, reordering stops, saving trips to a user account, and exporting a basic itinerary.
What it still won’t have
- Roadtrippers Autopilot itinerary generation trained on their 42M trips
- Access to their curated 'Extraordinary Places' POI dataset (5 million points of interest)
- Offline maps, live traffic, and RV GPS features
- Member deals and partnership integrations
What remains hard
- Proprietary data
Roadtrippers Autopilot™ creates your itinerary based on what we've learned from over 42 million trips.
- Proprietary data
All plans include access to curated road trip guides, Extraordinary Places, and 5 million points of interest.
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 19 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal web road-trip planner using React + Mapbox GL + Node/Express + Postgres. Include: POI search (third‑party places API), map UI with draggable stops and route visualization, route calculation using a routing API, save/load trips per user, simple CSV/GPX export, and OAuth/email login. Out of scope: Autopilot recommendation model, offline maps, live traffic, and member deals. Provide error handling, unit/integration tests for API endpoints, and deployment scripts (Docker + single small VPS).
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score57
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time — so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 4
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productRoad Trip Planner – Find the best stops along the way | Roadtrippers
- official pricingPlan your trip to Rocky Mountain National Park - Roadtrippers
- open sourceliketrek/TREK
- open sourceitskovacs/trip
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
