About Plot Along

Plot Along picks up where other route planners leave off. It’s built from the ground up around three ideas.

Full control. You should choose every road you take. You place every waypoint, you decide every road segment. The planner routes between your points, but you’re always in charge of the path. No algorithm overriding your choices with a “better” suggestion.

Real collaboration. When you’re planning with others, it should feel like you’re actually doing it together. Multiple people on the same map, at the same time: live cursors, instant sync, shared editing. Not passing files back and forth or texting screenshots of someone else’s plan.

Compatibility. Open your route in your preferred navigation app, or export it to your GPS device. Everybody gets the directions they’re accustomed to while sticking together on the road.

I’m Taylor, a driving enthusiast and app developer. My wife and I have a shared passion for road-tripping on our motorcycles. We tried all the apps out there for route planning, but none of them ever really solved all our problems, or left us feeling happy and excited for the trip. Experiences ran the gamut from powerful but exhausting, to simple but ineffective.

I made Plot Along so we could plan trips together the way we wanted to, with intuitive, easy-to-use controls. Now I want to share this app with all of the other road-trippers, van-lifers, group ride coordinators, road cyclists and travelers out there. Plot Along is a tool for anyone who enjoys the drive, with or without a destination.

Existing route planners are built to get you from A to B. They optimize for speed, distance or tolls. If you care about the road itself, your options are limited, and planning with other people means juggling screenshots, group chats and half-finished map projects that no one else can edit. There was friction at every corner:

“Avoid highways” isn’t enough. You don’t always want to avoid highways. Sometimes the state route is the scenic one. Sometimes the four-lane bypass is the fastest way through a city. What you actually want is to choose which roads you take, segment by segment. Existing tools don’t let you do that without fighting the algorithm every step of the way.

Auto-generated curvy routes are a coin toss. Tools that promise twisty roads deliver slow neighborhood drives or unexpected gravel just as often as they deliver the mountain switchbacks you were hoping for. You end up re-doing the work by hand anyway.

Sharing is an afterthought. You finish a route, then what? Export a file. Text a screenshot. Hope the other person’s app can open it. If two people are planning the same trip, there’s no good way for both of them to work on it at the same time. One person plans, the other follows.

We built Plot Along because collaborative trip planning deserves a purpose-built tool: a route planner that feels like a shared whiteboard. Simple enough for your least technical family member, powerful enough to export a polished route to a GPS device or navigation app.