A free calimoto alternative: what you get, what you give up

If you ride for the sake of riding, you found calimoto the same way most people did: you got sick of a car sat-nav sending you down a dual carriageway to save four minutes, went looking for something that understood the point, and there it was. Curvy routing was a genuinely good idea, and calimoto deserves credit for making it mainstream.

Then the subscription prompt arrived, and you started wondering how much of that idea is actually expensive to build.

Not much, it turns out. This is an honest look at what a free alternative gives you, where the paid apps still legitimately win, and how to move across without losing anything.

What “curvy routing” actually is

Under the hood, every routing app is doing the same thing: turning the road network into a graph, giving each stretch of road a cost, and finding the cheapest path from A to B. A car sat-nav costs roads by time. A curvy motorcycle router changes what “cheap” means — it rewards bends, penalises motorways and dual carriageways, and leans toward smaller sealed roads with a bit of elevation.

The expensive part is not the idea. It is the tuning — the hours spent making sure the result is a road you would actually choose, rather than a farm track that happens to have a lot of corners in it.

That is the whole trick. It is a real engineering job, but it is not a subscription-sized one, and we hand the result to you free.

Feature by feature

Here is where the two land, honestly. calimoto changes its plans from time to time, so treat the pricing column as “check before you buy” rather than gospel.

	Motoridez	calimoto
Curvy route planning	Free	Free tier limited; full use is paid
Turn-by-turn voice navigation	Free	Paid tier
Round trips from your location	Free	Paid tier
GPX import and export	Free	Paid tier
Ride recording and history	Free	Free
Offline maps	Free — download the map for any planned route	Paid tier, whole regions
Ridden-roads tracking	Yes, GPS-confirmed	No
Avoid-roads-you-have-ridden routing	Yes	No
Group rides, live position, hazard reports	Free	Partial
Crash detection	Free	No

Two rows in there are worth expanding, one in each direction.

Riding without signal: what each app gives you

Both apps ride offline. They go about it differently, and the difference decides which suits you.

Motoridez downloads the route. Plan the ride, tap download, and the map along that route comes down to the phone — a corridor either side of the line, along with your fuel and food stops and your ridden-roads data. Ride it in flight mode and everything renders. Rides recorded out of coverage queue up and sync when you are back in range. It is free, and it costs you a fraction of the storage a whole region does.

calimoto downloads the region. Entire areas held on the phone, in the paid tier, whether or not you have planned anything in them.

The practical difference is improvisation. If you plan your ride and then ride it, the route download covers you completely. If you head into country with no coverage and decide as you go — abandoning the plan, asking for a fresh route from a valley with no bars — a whole region on the phone is the better tool, and that is the one thing we do not do yet.

Be honest about which of those two riders you are before you switch.

The gap that goes the other way: your map remembers

Here is the thing no paid curvy-routing app does, and it is the reason Motoridez exists.

Every ride you record is map-matched to the real roads you rode — GPS-confirmed against the road itself, not guessed from the route you planned. Over a season, your map fills in. Roads you have ridden go orange. Roads you have not stay grey.

Then you can ask for a route that avoids the orange. Same hometown, same two hours, a road you have never turned onto. That is a different product idea from “make this route curvy”, and it is the one that keeps riders opening the app in their third year rather than their third week.

Most riders discover they have been riding the same 40 kilometres for years. The map is a slightly confronting thing to look at the first time.

Switching without losing anything

Your routes are yours, and GPX is the format that makes that true.

1. Export from calimoto. Open a saved tour, use the share or export option, and pick GPX. Do this for the ones you actually re-ride — most people have five or six.
2. Import into Motoridez. The planner takes a GPX and rebuilds it as a route with draggable waypoints, so you can adjust rather than being stuck with a frozen line.
3. Keep your ride history where it is. Past rides in calimoto stay in calimoto; nothing forces you to delete them. Run both for a month if you want to compare on roads you know.
4. Record one real ride on the new app before you commit. Not a test around the block — a proper Sunday. Recording behaviour, battery drain and voice prompt timing only show themselves on a real ride.

Who should stay on the paid app

A recommendation you can trust has to include the case against itself, so:

• You ride improvised routes deep in country with no coverage, where holding a whole region on the phone beats downloading a planned one.
• You have years of tours in calimoto with a workflow you like, and the switching cost is not worth it to you.
• You need a specific integration a free app does not have.

If none of those describe you, the paid tier is buying you something you can get for nothing.

Who should switch

• You mostly ride day rides and weekends within coverage.
• You are paying a subscription for curvy routing and voice guidance, and that is essentially all you use.
• You are bored of your local roads and want the app to fix that rather than just re-drawing the same loop with more bends.
• You ride with people, and you want group rides, live position sharing and rider-reported hazards without another paywall.

That last one matters more than riders expect. A curvy route is a solved problem. A group of six not fragmenting across 60 kilometres of back road is not.

The obvious question

If it is free, what is the catch?

There is no advertising in the app, and rider location data is not sold or handed to data brokers — that is the whole business model question answered in a sentence, and we have written up why the app is free and how it stays that way at more length. The infrastructure genuinely is cheap once you are not paying a third party every time a rider plans a route. The plan for revenue later is optional extras for riders who want them, not switching off navigation you already rely on.

You are right to ask, though. Ask it of every app you give a year of your movements to.