Simple Routing – Low Cost Vehicle Routing APIs

At my last job, I worked on vehicle routing logistics - think traveling salesman problem, but with hundreds of vehicles across thousands of locations. I rewrote the entire routing platform, and in doing so I researched the market for vehicle routing API providers (distance matrix, directions), and identified a gap:

- OSRM offers a free, public, but restricted API - Paid providers (e.g. Google Maps) are expensive, scale cost with use, and typically require sales calls - Self hosting OSRM requires beefy, dedicated infrastructure, maintenance and devops

The missing middle is a shared OSRM infrastructure, made available at a low cost with generous rate limits. Rather than paying for a sales team, pricing reflects the costs to serve traffic.

I built Simple Routing to fill the gap for developers who, like me, want consistent, up-front low pricing for reasonable volume. It's live now with a few dozen signups and first paid users coming in.

To be clear, this service isn't for large companies who are better off with a true B2B SaaS contract; rather, this is for small or new projects, hobbyists, local and staging environments.

The open source projects OSRM and VROOM power the vehicle routing APIs. The API gateway is built with Django. The entire infrastructure is hosted on a Hetzner dedicated server - this keeps costs low enough to break even at a dozen paid users.

What's your experience been in this space?