A year ago this month, we started work on PitStopper. And the tracks you have imported into it have now passed two million kilometres. That's about fifty times round the world, one GPX file at a time.
Where it started
PitStopper went live a few weeks later, at the beginning of November 2025. It began as a web version of a small Python command-line tool: give it a GPX track, and it looked up the useful places along it in OpenStreetMap. Water, food, somewhere to sleep. The web version did the same job without a terminal, with a map to see the answers on.
That is still the heart of it. Almost everything else arrived over the year that followed, with updates, fixes and new features going out nearly every week.
The big things
- Our own POI servers. Searches started out on public Overpass servers. They now run on our own PostGIS servers, up to 20 times faster, and the stops along your route are loaded before you ask.
- A route planner. You no longer need a GPX file to start: plan a route in PitStopper, or turn a recorded track into a turn-by-turn route.
- Multi-day trips. Several routes in one project, splitting a long route into days, and loops for endurance events.
- Getting it onto your device. GPX, FIT, KML and GPZ exports that keep your stops when Garmin would delete them, Send to Phone with a QR code, Share Project as a link, and PitStopper On-the-go, our Android app, now in alpha.
- Seeing the route. A 3D view, an animated flyover, route videos, and a map that speaks your language.
- Never losing your work. Projects save as you go, and the new Version history lets you go back to any earlier version.
The niche things
Some features exist because one rider needed them, and they turned out to be useful to others too:
- Historical weather for the days you plan to ride, and a wind overlay on the map.
- Fuel prices and opening hours, down to whether a cafe will be open when you reach it.
- UK food hygiene ratings in the POI popups.
- Named peaks on the map, viewpoints worth a detour, and hazards and road surfaces along the way.
- Custom OpenStreetMap tags, for when the place you need isn't one of our categories.
- Auto order, for alleycats and checkpoint events with no set route.
- Tools for the file nerds: the GPX inspector, track comparison, and navigation extensions that read and write turn cues, viapoints and surface. There are your own icons on stops too, with their anchors kept, and, most recently, animated ones.
Along the way we have counted ice-cream stops on the London to Brighton, planned water for a 4,914 km Transcontinental and mapped the darkness on the UTMB.
What comes next
Development carries on, on two fronts.
The PitStopper website is where most of the work will go, but as refinement rather than invention: improving the features that are already there, and tidying up the layout so they are easier to find. Honestly, we have run out of ideas for new features ourselves.
The app is the newer and less certain part. We have started PitStopper On-the-go, an Android app that takes your planned route and its stops with you, offline, and tells you what is coming up. It is in alpha, and we are not yet sure whether an app for finding stops on the road is something riders want, or whether the planning on the website is the part that matters. We will keep developing it, and we would love to hear from anyone who tries it.
That goes for both. Most of the best ideas in PitStopper came from users: an email, a sample file, a "could it also...". If something is missing, awkward or just wrong, tell us. We read everything.
Thank you
To everyone who has sent an idea, a bug report or a file that broke something: thank you. A lot of what is in this post exists because one of you asked for it.
And a special thank you to one user in Belgium, who has been a huge encouragement all year. Careful testing, side-by-side comparisons and patient explanations of how other apps behave, sent in email after email, have shaped and improved many of the features above. PitStopper is a much better tool for it.
Thank you for a brilliant first year, and for the two million kilometres.
