bikerouter.de – 2025 Recap

As in the last few years (2023, 2024), I’m taking a brief look back at 2025 around bikerouter.de.

I’ll give a very short, bullet-point-style overview of the most important changes in 2025 and once again take a look at the statistics.

New features and changes#

It’s no exaggeration to say that 2025 was the year with the most changes so far, both in front of and behind the scenes of Bikerouter.

I don’t want to go into detail here, because the post would become far too long. So this year I’ll stick to a list of the relevant changes. Some of them are linked to posts here on the blog where I go into more detail about the feature:

Web app#

• improved/more accurate route analysis (section in the manual)
• overlay for the OpenCampingMap
• short links for routes for easy sharing and saving; reworked sharing dialog, more compact QR code
• reworked download/export dialog
• total distance (cumulative) as a new column in the detailed data table (sidebar)
• button and keyboard shortcut (Shift+B) to display the route zoomed and centered on the screen
• split routes at specific waypoints
• new shortcuts to select route alternatives 1, 2, and 3 (Shift+1, Shift+2, Shift+3, Shift+0 for the original)
• some new overlays: CycloOSM Lite, Mapterhorn hillshading
• new sidebar or main menu (“hamburger” menu, F2); navigation bar completely redesigned
• elevation display under mouse cursor, later version 2 with better data
• measure distances directly on the map
• management of customized routing profiles (save, load, delete)
• syntax highlighting in the profile editor
• elevation profile can be switched to solid color
• round-trip planner (new button on the left edge of the screen or Shift+R; documentation in the manual)
• coloring uploaded tracks
• “What’s New” notification + dialog
• routing profile configurable per segment
• outside Europe, switch from SRTM90 elevation data to SRTM30 for routing (in Europe, high-resolution data has already been used since 2024)
• FixGPX for enriching GPX tracks with elevation data
• impressive speed increase for longer routes and routes with many waypoints by replacing the AlpineJS library with hand-written code

Behind the scenes#

• complete rebuild of the web app’s build process: Gulp was replaced by Vite.
• modernization of the codebase (migration to ESM, increased use of modern browser features like fetch() etc.); there is still a lot of work to be done here in the future…
• hosting of frontend + routing engine completely in containers, separate environments for dev snapshot (“nightly”) and staging, continuous integration and automatic deployment. For this I set up a self-hosted Gitea with two action runners.
• another dedicated server for routing, which means routes are calculated on average 40 % to 50 % faster than before
• caching of calculated route segments
• a new web service that provides terrain elevations worldwide; it forms the basis for the elevation measurement feature and FixGPX.
• settings framework

I also started working on a bilingual manual for Bikerouter.

Starting in March, just for fun, I wrote down the time I spent on Bikerouter and so far I’ve reached just under 220 hours. That’s a little more than one month of full-time work if you assume 40 hours per week, and also significantly more than I had expected 😲

The time I spent answering several hundred emails isn’t included in that number. I had planned to stop doing that so extensively for time reasons, but I didn’t really manage to stick to that resolution in 2025.

Statistics#

In 2025, bikerouter.de recorded over 1.3 million visits¹, which is about 50% more than in 2024.

The top operating systems of visitors were (almost unchanged from 2024):

• Windows
• Android
• iOS
• macOS
• Linux

Browsers (also unchanged from 2024, but usage is now clearly shifting away from Firefox towards Chrome; the Chrome category also includes clones like Vivaldi, etc.):

• Firefox
• Chrome
• Safari
• Edge
• Opera

The split by device is about 65% desktop and 35% smartphone and tablet, and thus roughly the same as last year.

Countries:

• 🇩🇪 Germany
• 🇫🇷 France
• 🇦🇹 Austria
• 🇵🇱 Poland
• 🇨🇭 Switzerland

Fun fact on the side: In 2025 I had the complete OpenStreetMap database recomputed into routing data for Bikerouter around 2,000 times. That means there are five to six updates of the routing data — per day! Changes in OpenStreetMap are therefore available in Bikerouter within a few hours.

Finances#

As in the previous year, I’d like to briefly address the financial aspect of bikerouter.de. The good news right at the start:

Your contributions also ensured in 2025 that I was able to pay all the hosting bills without having to use my own money — even though expenses were significantly higher again this year. Renting additional dedicated server hardware definitely made itself felt.

Currently, the hosting bills add up to just under 250 euros per month. On top of that, there are annual costs for two and a half registered domains, as well as the costs for on-demand servers that generate the gravel overlay.

I’m incredibly happy that I’m able to run the project in a financially neutral way for myself, and I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to all supporters! ❤️

The project has always been and will of course remain a hobby for me: everything I build for it, I do in my spare time. I’m very happy to invest this time (see above) and every time I notice how well the software works, it makes me happy all over again.

But it’s also great to know that the server operating costs were covered for the entire year and that I didn’t have to pay the money out of my own pocket every month.

As in the last two years, I transferred the unused donations, amounting to 250 euros, to FOSSGIS e.V..

I also sent Sonny some money again for his great work on the elevation data: https://sonny.4lima.de.

Support bikerouter.de#

If you’d like to support the operation and further development of bikerouter.de in 2026, the best way to do so is with a donation. There are the following options:

• GitHub Sponsors
• PayPal
• Ko-Fi
• SEPA transfer
• Liberapay

By the way, all donors are listed in the bikerouter.de Hall of Fame (sometimes with a little delay).

Thank you very much! ❤️