About OpenRydr

Why this exists

I built OpenRydr because the apps riders rely on were getting worse.

Rever, Calimoto, the rest — they each started with a clear motorcycle-first idea, then drifted toward locking the things riders need most behind subscriptions. Turn-by-turn navigation. Curvy and scenic route types. Cloud backup. Group features. Ride history. The list keeps growing. Meanwhile, the apps that don’t charge — Google Maps, Waze — were never built for motorcycles in the first place. They route you onto interstates because interstates are fastest. They don’t care about pavement quality, lean angles, or whether the road has any character at all.

There was a clear gap between “great for motorcycles, expensive” and “free, but not for motorcycles.” OpenRydr exists to close that gap.

Three commitments

Three things drive every product decision:

Open by default. Turn-by-turn navigation, offline maps, and ride recording are all free (with CarPlay and Android Auto on the way). So are all five route types — Quick, No Highway, Twisty, Scenic, and Long Way Round — including the curvy and scenic routing other apps put behind their paywalls. Safety features are free too, because safety should never be a paid tier. Group riding and a few power-user features have a small subscription because they have real ongoing infrastructure costs — group riding alone requires real-time servers. Everything else is free because keeping it free is the whole point.

Privacy as architecture, not a marketing claim. Your ride data lives on your phone. We don’t upload your GPS traces. We don’t sell your location history because we never collect it. The community road database — the long-term project to build a real rider-driven map of where the good roads are — is opt-in, off by default, and the data we collect from contributors is anonymous and aggregate. These aren’t promises; they’re how the system is built.

Made for the long ride.Lots of motorcycle apps have come and gone over the years. The plan with OpenRydr is to still be here in five years, doing the same thing, with the same approach to pricing and privacy. That means the business has to be sustainable, which means a small subscription on the parts that genuinely cost money to run. It doesn’t mean adding new paywalls every quarter to satisfy a growth chart.

Built in the garage

OpenRydr is an independent project. I’m building it on my own time, on my own dime, the way you’d build any motorcycle in your garage — one part at a time, paying attention to the details, working on it because it’s the thing you wanted to exist.

That has tradeoffs. Updates ship at the pace one person can ship them. Some features have to wait. But it also means the product can stay aligned with riders. The honest version is: this works because the app doesn’t need to make a lot of money. It just needs to cover its costs and grow at a sustainable pace.

If you’re tired of the same paywall conversation every time you open a motorcycle app, you’re who this is for.

— Cole Barthel