Why Motoridez is free, and how it stays that way

“It’s free” is the sentence that makes a sensible person suspicious, and it should. Free usually means you are the product, and in a category where the app watches where you go, that suspicion is entirely earned.

So here is the actual answer, with the numbers-shaped parts intact.

What makes navigation apps expensive

Two things dominate the cost of running a navigation product, and only one of them is unavoidable.

Per-request bills. Most apps in this category rent their routing and their maps from someone else, and pay every time a rider plans a route or loads a screenful of map. At any real scale that becomes the dominant line item, and it is why so many free tiers ration planning or stop working after a few routes a month. That rationing is not greed — it is a bill arriving every time you press the button.

People. Building the thing and supporting the riders using it. Nobody escapes this one.

We built our own routing rather than renting it. That was more work up front, and it removed the per-rider bill entirely — so one more rider planning one more route costs us close to nothing.

That is the whole answer. Not generosity: a different set of decisions made early, and a willingness to do the harder version of the work so the result could be free.

What we will not do

Since we are asking you to trust a free app with your movements, the commitments should be specific rather than reassuring:

• We do not sell ride or location data. Not to data brokers, not to insurers, not to advertisers, not “anonymised” to anyone.
• We do not run advertising. No ads, no sponsored routes, no fuel station paying to be the recommended stop. When the router suggests a road, it is because the model scored it, not because someone bought the slot.
• We do not track you when you are not riding. GPS runs while a ride is recording and stops when you end it.
• We do not make your rides public by default. A ride is yours until you deliberately share it, and shares are revocable.

More detail is in what we do and do not do with ride data and in the privacy policy, which is deliberately written in English rather than in legal boilerplate.

So how does this get funded eventually?

Honestly: today it is funded by us, because the bills are small and building it is the point. That is not a plan that scales forever, so here is the intended direction.

What may become paid, one day: things that cost real money per rider or that only some riders want. Long-term storage of years of rides at large volume. Deeper tooling for people who organise rides commercially. Whole-region offline downloads, if we build them, since holding entire regions is a genuine cost that scales with use — the per-route download you have today stays free.

What will not become paid: curvy route planning, turn-by-turn voice navigation, ride recording, offline downloads for the routes you plan, your ridden-roads map, group rides, hazard reports, crash detection. These exist free today and riders build habits on them. Taking away something someone depends on in order to sell it back is the move that makes people hate software, and we would rather not.

If that distinction ever changes, it will be announced plainly and in advance, not discovered by a rider at the start of a Sunday morning.

Why “free” is a product decision, not a marketing one

There is a strategic reason too, and it is worth being open about because it explains why the incentives line up.

The app gets better as more riders record rides. Rider-reported hazards are useless with ten users and genuinely valuable with ten thousand. Group features are worthless if your riding mates cannot install the app because of a subscription. A paywall in front of navigation directly reduces the thing that makes the product good.

For a network-shaped product, free is not a loss leader. It is the mechanism.

What you should still check

Do not take any of this on faith, including from us:

• Read the privacy policy of every app you give a year of your movements to. Look specifically for what happens to location data and whether it is shared with third parties.
• Check whether you can export your data. If you cannot get a GPX out, you do not own your routes.
• Check whether account deletion is real and self-service. Ours is at /delete-account.
• Watch what happens at the moment you want to navigate. That is where free tiers usually stop being free.

Judge us on those four things rather than on this page. That is the only kind of trust worth having in a category like this one.