Frequently asked questions

You give it a starting point and a list of stops; it works out the fastest order to drive them, using live Google traffic data rather than straight-line guesses. If you have several drivers, it also decides who takes which stops — balancing the split by time, distance and stop count so nobody gets stuck with a monster route.

Route optimization is the one call that costs real money — every press runs a routing engine against Google's traffic data. Tokens pass that cost on transparently, priced by the size of the route, instead of a flat subscription you might barely use. Adding stops — searching, dictating, or importing a list — is free. You only spend tokens when you actually optimize. Tokens don't expire.

Searching, dictating and importing addresses are all free, so instead of a price there's a generous hourly cap on each — comfortably more than a real day's work — to keep “free” from turning into “unlimited.” If you hit one, the message tells you how long to wait; for imports specifically, anything already looked up before the cap kicked in is kept, so you don't lose that work.

Packs run from $2.50 for 10 tokens (25¢ each) down to $100.00 for 1,000 tokens (10¢ each) — the more you buy, the cheaper each token gets. New workspaces start with 10 free tokens. Full pricing is on the Tokens page.

Yes. As an admin, go to Team and create a sub-account with a username and password — no email address needed, which matters when you're handing credentials to a driver. Sub-accounts spend from your shared token balance, and you can see exactly how much each one has used. You can revoke a sub-account's access instantly if someone leaves, without deleting their history.

The workspace does — there's one shared balance. Only admins can buy tokens, so a driver can never commit you to a charge, but any member can spend from the pool.

Three free ways: paste a plain list of addresses (one per line), upload a CSV file, or scan a photo of a label or manifest. You can shoot one with the camera or pick an image you already have — a shot from earlier, a screenshot of a dispatch email, anything readable. A fresh camera shot asks you to crop it down to just the addresses, which is what keeps row numbers, column headers and the next label over out of the result; a photo you bring in is scanned as-is, with cropping offered if it shows more than you want. Either way Roptimal reads the addresses off it, splitting into several stops if it catches more than one. All of these land in the same review step, so you can double-check (and fix) anything before it's added.

A CSV (“comma-separated values”) is just a plain-text spreadsheet — the format Excel, Google Sheets and most delivery or order-management systems export to when you choose “Download as CSV” or “Export.” If one of its columns is named something like “address,” “location” or “destination,” Roptimal finds it automatically; otherwise it just reads the file as a plain address list. Don't have a spreadsheet handy? Pasting a list, or dropping in a photo, works just as well.

Google caps a single routing request at 25 waypoints, but Roptimal works around that: it pre-sorts your stops locally (free), splits them into chunks, and then re-measures the whole thing end-to-end so the timings stay consistent. In practice several hundred stops is fine, and splitting across multiple drivers scales better still.

The arrows view draws direct lines between stops — instant, free, and good enough to sanity-check the order. The actual-route view fetches the real driving path along real roads. Both use the same optimized stop order; only the drawing differs.

Instead of “I'm leaving at 9am, when do I arrive?”, it answers “I must be done by 5pm, when do I need to leave?”. Because traffic depends on when you drive, it solves that iteratively rather than just subtracting. It works with several drivers too — everyone is planned to finish by the same deadline, and each driver gets their own departure time, since a shorter round can start later.

Dragging is free, and so is Undo my changes. What costs tokens is Update times, because working out new arrival times runs the same paid routing against live traffic that optimizing does — so it's priced the same way, by the number of stops being re-measured (and with several drivers, only the ones you actually edited). The button tells you the price before you press it.

You can also skip it for nothing. The Google Maps link always carries your current order, and Maps works out the drive times for free when the driver opens it — you just don't get the arrival times listed here. For most small rearrangements that's the better deal, and the old departure time stays close enough to be useful unless the new order is dramatically worse.

Yes, if their sub-account has a mobile number on it — add one when you create the driver, or any time afterwards from the Team page. A “Text to driver” button then appears next to each driver's route, which opens your own messaging app with their route link ready to send (and, on an arrive-by plan, the time they need to leave). It sends from your phone, not from us, so the driver gets it from a number they already recognise.

Usually it doesn't: the road shape is saved in your browser when it's first drawn, so reopening a recent route brings the real roads straight back at no cost to anyone.

Straight lines mean we don't have that shape stored — it was drawn on another device, or it has aged out, or storage was cleared. Drawing it again is a paid request for a route you already paid for, so we don't do it automatically. Nothing else is missing: the order, the arrival times, the distances and the Google Maps link are exactly as you left them, and opening it in Google Maps gives you turn-by-turn roads and live traffic for free — which is where you're heading to drive it anyway. Real roads come back on our map the next time you optimize.

No. Every address your browser has looked up before is remembered locally for about three months, so re-importing last week's route sheet mostly skips the lookups entirely — faster for you, and it leaves your hourly allowance for addresses that are genuinely new. Only addresses we don't recognise are sent to be located, and those stay in your browser rather than on our servers.

Your current, in-progress route is kept in your own browser so a refresh doesn't lose your work — it isn't uploaded. What we do store on our servers is your account, your token balance, a log of how many tokens each action cost, and your workspace's route history — the last 10 routes anyone on your team optimized, plus any starred as favorites — so a route can be reopened in Google Maps without paying to recalculate it. Those saved entries are a short label and a Google Maps link, never the individual stop addresses. Full detail is in our Privacy Policy.

No — never. We don't sell, rent or trade your data, your workspace's data, or your customers' addresses to anyone, for any reason, and we don't use it for advertising. The third-party services we rely on (Google Maps, Clerk, Stripe, Supabase) only ever see what they need to do their one job — routing, sign-in, payment, storage — under our and their own privacy terms. See our Privacy Policy for the full breakdown.

If you're an admin: Settings → Danger zone. This deletes the whole workspace, including every sub-account and the token balance. It's immediate and can't be undone, and unspent tokens aren't refunded.

Sub-accounts can't delete themselves — that's deliberate, so a driver can't quietly disappear from the team without their admin knowing. Ask your admin to remove you from the Team page.

Unspent tokens can be refunded within 30 days of purchase — email support@roptimal.app. Tokens already spent can't be refunded, since the API calls they paid for have already happened.