Every morning, in dispatch rooms across Europe, the same ritual plays out. A stack of orders lands on a desk. A map is pulled up. A human — smart, experienced, tired — tries to answer a question that has more possible answers than there are atoms in the observable universe: in what order should these fifteen stops be visited, across these three vans, so we burn the least fuel?
The good ones spend an hour and get it almost right. The rest spend two hours and get it wrong in ways nobody notices until the fuel card bill arrives.
Route Formula is the alternative. It's a delivery route optimization platform that takes those fifteen stops and three vans, does the math in under two seconds, and hands your drivers a plan that is provably shorter than the one a human would have drawn.
This is the story of what we built, why, and how it can give you back your mornings.
The problem with "we'll just figure it out"
The travelling salesman problem is one of the most studied problems in computer science. It's also, for most small and mid-size delivery operators, a problem solved by intuition and Google Maps tabs.
That's understandable. Enterprise route optimization suites exist, but they price themselves for DHL, not for a regional bakery with four vans. They demand integrations, training, consultants. The gap between "hand-planning with coloured markers" and "six-figure software deployment" is enormous — and most fleets live in that gap, losing 15–25% of their transport budget to suboptimal routes they don't even know are suboptimal.
Industry studies from McKinsey, Gartner, Routific and Descartes consistently show 17–30% fuel savings from proper route optimization. That's not a marketing number. That's the cost of winging it.
We built Route Formula to collapse that gap.
What Route Formula does
In plain English: you give it a depot, some stops, and a fleet. It gives you back the fastest route for every vehicle.
In slightly less plain English, it's a web application that combines a solver for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with an opinionated, mobile-friendly UI designed for dispatchers who have fifteen minutes — not fifteen hours — to plan a day.
Under the hood, we lean on the OpenStreetMap road network, real drive-time estimates, and a solver tuned to produce routes that are not just mathematically shortest but also driveable — balanced between vehicles, respectful of capacity limits, and sane about who goes where.
Four steps, one optimized fleet
The app is deliberately linear. You follow a wizard. The wizard respects your time.
- Set Your Depot. Drop a pin on an interactive map, or type an address. This is where every route begins and ends.
- Add Your Stops. Type them in with autocomplete, paste from a spreadsheet, or bulk-import a CSV or Excel file. Each stop is geocoded and validated in real time — no more "street not found" surprises at 9 a.m.
- Optimize. Click one button. In seconds, every vehicle gets a colour-coded route on the map with total distance and estimated travel time.
- Review & Export. Browse your full history of optimizations, toggle individual vehicle routes on and off, and export a polished PDF with map snapshots — the kind you can hand to a driver or email to a client.
That's the loop. Depot, stops, optimize, drive.
What's inside the box
A few features that make the difference between a demo and a tool you use every day:
- Multi-vehicle, capacity-aware optimization. Set each vehicle's capacity, maximum number of tasks, and maximum travel time. The solver respects all three simultaneously — it won't overload a van or send one driver on an eleven-hour shift while another finishes at lunch.
- Advanced Planner with multiple variants. Not sure which strategy fits your day? The advanced mode generates several optimized plans side by side — a speed-focused plan, a balanced plan, a capacity-maximising plan — streamed live via server-sent events as they're computed. Pick the one that fits your reality.
- Bulk CSV & Excel import. Paste forty stops at once. The app geocodes them in parallel, flags ambiguous addresses, and lets you fix them before you burn credits on a bad optimization.
- Fleet management. Add drivers and vehicles once; reuse them forever. No more retyping capacities.
- History & PDF export. Every optimization is saved. Click any historical run to replay it on the map, filter by vehicle, and export a branded PDF — complete with a real map snapshot, not a screenshot of a screenshot.
- Credits-based pricing. You pay for optimizations, not seats. Unlimited users. Unlimited drivers. Unlimited vehicles. Starter tier at €9/month; full pricing on the pricing page.
Who it's for
If you run a delivery operation that ships between 10 and 500 stops per day, across 2 to 30 vehicles, and your current planning tool is "experience + Google Maps" — Route Formula is built for you.
That's couriers, food distributors, B2B wholesalers, home-delivery retailers, medical couriers, flower shops that decided to scale, and a dozen other operations that have outgrown intuition but can't yet justify SAP TM.
We're currently live across Romania, with the rest of Europe rolling out through 2026.
Why we built it
Because the delta between "planned by a person in an hour" and "planned by a solver in a second" is measurable, and it is large. Because your drivers deserve routes that don't double back on themselves. Because 30% of fleet fuel cost is not a rounding error.
And because — honestly — we like the idea that somewhere, tomorrow morning, a dispatcher is going to click one button, pour a coffee, and have their entire day planned before the steam clears.
If that sounds like a morning you'd like to have, start your first free optimization. Setup takes two minutes. The math will take us two seconds.
Welcome to Route Formula.