Route Planner for Delivery Drivers: Four Apps Compared on Cost and AI

For a handful of drivers, Routific and Spoke Dispatch are cheapest: roughly $125 to $300 a month at 1,000 to 2,000 stops. Route4Me starts at $199 and Onfleet at $619. All four optimise routes; the plainly AI features are narrower, mostly Route4Me's enterprise scenario tool and Routific's MCP link for AI agents.

The prices are only comparable once you convert them into your own monthly volume, because the four vendors count different things: Routific counts orders, Spoke counts stops, Onfleet counts completed deliveries and Route4Me lists flat plans. Everything below is list pricing read from vendor pages on 5 November 2026, so confirm it before you commit.

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What dispatch-side planning means for a firm with several drivers

A driver-side app tells one person where to go next. A dispatch-side planner does the harder job: it takes a pile of orders for the day, splits them across drivers and vehicles, puts each driver's stops in a sensible order, sends the routes to phones and lets the office see progress. That is what these four products do, and it is why they price by volume or by plan rather than as a free map download.

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The decision only matters once you have two or more drivers sharing one stop list. With one driver, a spreadsheet and a maps app are fine. With four drivers and 120 stops a day, someone is already spending an hour or more every morning deciding who takes which cluster of streets, and that hour is the cost the software replaces. If you want the single-driver and courier angle first, the tutorial on whether a small courier firm can use AI to plan routes covers it.

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The examples here use a florist with four van drivers delivering bouquets and plants, because florists have the two features that stress a planner: strict delivery windows (a wedding at 2pm cannot arrive at 4pm) and a sharp seasonal peak.

The four apps at list price

All figures are USD list prices from each vendor's own pricing page on 5 November 2026. Vendors change plans often, so treat them as a guide and recheck before a trial turns into a subscription.

Three details the headline figures hide. Spoke's Starter plan keeps your data for 30 days, Premium for a year and Expert for five years, which matters if you want to look back at last Christmas. Routific's free tier includes every feature except SMS notifications, so you can test the whole product on real orders before paying. And Onfleet's Launch plan comes with core routing; advanced route optimisation starts on Scale, although API and webhook access come with every plan. Onfleet's contracts can be monthly or annual.

How each one counts what you use

Routific counts an order once, when it is scheduled onto a route; you can re-optimise as often as you like and carry orders to the next day without being charged again. Orders that are uploaded but cannot be fitted onto any route are not counted. Spoke bills by stops. Onfleet bills by tasks that reach Completed status, so a failed delivery that never completes does not use your allowance. Those differences are small at 300 stops a month and noticeable at 3,000.

Four drivers, 2,640 stops a month: the main sum

Illustrative figures. Say the florist has four drivers, each doing 30 stops a day over 22 working days. That is 4 x 30 x 22 = 2,640 stops, and for this shop each stop is one order.

• Routific: the first 1,000 orders cost $150. Orders 1,001 to 2,000 are 1,000 x $0.15 = $150. Orders 2,001 to 2,640 are 640 x $0.13 = $83.20. Total $383.20 a month.
• Spoke Dispatch, Starter: $125 plus 1,640 extra stops x $0.04 = $65.60, so $190.60. On Premium it would be $200 plus 640 x $0.06 = $38.40, so $238.40. The $48 difference buys a branded tracking page, a year of data and richer proof of delivery.
• Onfleet, Launch: $619 covers 2,500 completed deliveries, so the last 140 are billed at a per-task rate the page does not state. The honest answer is "at least $619".
• Route4Me: $199 to $349 a month depending on tier, plus paid add-ons such as text-message notifications. Whether that is per account or per driver is the question to get answered before anything else.

The spread is wide: about $190 to $620 for roughly the same job. Price is not the whole answer, though. The $619 plan buys what Onfleet calls its #1-rated driver app, plus chain-of-custody features such as barcode scans, ID and age verification aimed at regulated deliveries (guided onboarding arrives on Scale). A florist does not need those; a pharmacy courier might.

Three volumes side by side

The pricing shape matters more than any one number. Routific and Spoke grow smoothly with volume; Onfleet and Route4Me are step plans. Here are the same sums at a quiet, a typical and a busy month for the florist (the busy figure imagines a shop running eight drivers at 40 stops a day).

Check the first row: 50 orders above 1,000 at $0.15 is $7.50, so $157.50. The last Routific figure is $150 + $150 + $130 + $200 + $163.20 = $793.20 across its bands. Spoke's Starter at 7,040 stops is $125 plus 6,040 x $0.04 = $241.60, so $366.60. On Premium it is $200 plus 5,040 x $0.06 = $302.40, so $502.40.

The lesson is not that Spoke wins. It is that Spoke's per-stop rate is lower on paper, while Routific includes every feature at every volume and Spoke gates some features by plan. If the features you need sit on Premium, compare Premium's $502.40 with Routific's $793.20, not Starter's number.

Where the AI is, and where it is just a solver

Be sceptical of the word. Route optimisation, finding the best order of stops under time windows and vehicle limits, is a long-standing maths problem. All four vendors do it, and some call it AI. It is useful, but it is not the same thing as an assistant that reads your instructions.

What I found that is clearly AI-flavoured, from the vendors' own pages this week:

• Routific says on its pricing page that orders can come in from AI agents via MCP (Model Context Protocol, a standard way for AI assistants to connect to other software). In practice that means an assistant could hand today's order list to the planner instead of someone uploading a spreadsheet. It also describes its optimisation as AI-powered, with machine-learning models behind its ETAs. Its own savings claim is 15% to 40% less mileage and drive time compared with manual planning, which is a vendor figure, not something I have tested.
• Route4Me lists an "Enterprise AI Route Planning and Scenario Optimization" product that generates routing scenarios from natural-language prompts and tests what-if constraints for mixed fleets. The page shows it in structured data and does not say which plan includes it, so ask before assuming the $199 tier has it. It also lists automated parameter tuning.
• Spoke Dispatch offers optimisation, tracking and proof of delivery on every plan; I did not find a separate AI feature on its pricing page.
• Onfleet sells core routing on Launch and advanced route optimisation from Scale, plus dynamic ETA notifications and an operational command centre. Its pricing page does not use AI as the selling point.

So for a four-driver firm, "which has AI" is the wrong first question. A better one is "does its optimisation respect my delivery windows and my van capacity on my real stops". Test that, then see whether the AI extras save you any dispatcher time on top.

A one-day bake-off with your own stops

Do not judge any of these from the demo. Take one real day and run it through each trial the same way. Routific has a free tier that shows everything except text messages, and Spoke and Onfleet both offer a free trial. Route4Me's pricing page does not mention one, so ask its sales team for a trial or demo account on your own data.

1. Pick a day with a mess in it. Choose a day with at least one tight time window, one heavy order and one stop that is awkward to find. Easy days flatter every product.
2. Save the plan you actually drove. Note total miles, finish time and any stop that ran late. That is your baseline.
3. Import the same file to each planner. Use a spreadsheet upload with address, window start, window end, parcel count and notes. Time the import.
4. Record four numbers per planner: total distance, last stop's finish time, number of window breaches and minutes you spent editing the result by hand.
5. Send one route to a real phone. Ask a driver to follow it for ten minutes and tell you what was confusing.

A filled-in version of the scorecard, with invented numbers:

One more habit helps: ask the driver who followed each route what the app got wrong, because dispatchers see the map and drivers see the kerb. A planner that sends a van down a street with a weight limit, or to the front of a building whose loading bay is round the back, will look excellent on screen and cost you ten minutes a stop in practice. Write those complaints into the scorecard as a fifth row, and re-test the same awkward stops after the vendor's support team has told you how to mark them.

Planner B drove less but needed more edits and broke a window. If a missed wedding delivery costs you a customer, Planner A wins despite 5 more miles. Decide your weights before you see the results, so the scorecard does not become a justification for the one you already liked.

Cleaning the order file before it goes in

Most failed trials are bad addresses, not bad software. A planner that cannot geocode "Unit 4 behind the garage" will park a stop in the wrong place and your test fails for the wrong reason. An AI assistant is useful here, so long as you do not paste customers' names and phone numbers when you do not need to. Strip those columns and keep only the address and the notes.

Below is a list of delivery addresses with notes. Do not invent anything.
For each row return: tidy address (street, number, town, area code),
a time window if the notes mention one (24-hour clock), and a flag
"CHECK" if the address is ambiguous or missing a number.
Return a table I can paste into a spreadsheet.

A realistic sample output, illustrative:

| tidy address | window | flag |
| 14 Mill Lane, Ashby, AB1 2CD | 13:00-14:00 | |
| Rear of 9 High Street, AB1 3EF | | CHECK: "rear of" - which gate? |
| 27 Orchard Close, AB2 4GH | 09:00-11:00 | |

What to fix: the assistant will sometimes "correct" an area code that was right, so spot-check five rows against the original, and always send CHECK rows back to whoever took the order. This step typically takes a dispatcher a few minutes and prevents the worst morning surprises.

Three ways a planner purchase goes wrong

Misreading what is counted. Picture a bookshop that delivers local orders twice a week and assumes a planner will charge for every re-optimisation. Under Routific's rules re-running costs nothing because each order is counted once when scheduled; under Onfleet's rules a cancelled delivery that never completes costs nothing either. Read the counting rule first, because it changes which vendor is cheap for a stop-and-start business.

Text messages not in the quote. Routific and Onfleet both treat SMS as separate, usage-based or add-on pricing that varies by country, and Route4Me lists text-message notifications as a paid add-on. Spoke is the exception: its plan table lists customised SMS notifications on every plan, with a custom sender name from Premium. If customers expect "your driver is 10 minutes away" by text, add that line to every quote. Routific recommends email with its delivery tracker instead, on the grounds that email is cheaper and more reliable, and that is a sensible starting point for a florist.

Per-driver confusion in a seasonal business. The florist hires four extra drivers for two weeks in the busiest period. With unlimited drivers and billing by volume (Routific, Spoke, Onfleet) that costs only the extra stops. If Route4Me's plans turn out to be priced per driver, those two weeks could cost much more than they look. Ask, and get the answer in writing.

When each one is the better fit

• Routific suits a firm that wants every feature without choosing a plan, has a variable volume and wants a free tier to test with. It costs more than Spoke in the 2,000 to 5,000 stop range.
• Spoke Dispatch suits cost-sensitive firms with steady volume. Read the Starter limits (30-day data history, one service offering, fewer proof-of-delivery photos) before you rely on it.
• Route4Me suits a firm that needs a broad menu of add-ons, mixed fleets or the enterprise scenario tools, and is happy to negotiate. Its pricing page is the least transparent of the four.
• Onfleet suits operations where compliance and proof matter, such as pharmacy or regulated drops, or where multiple sites and courier partners share one platform. At $619 or more it is hard to justify for a four-van florist.

If you are already deciding where AI fits across the business, the tutorial on cutting parcel-tracking calls with AI delivery updates picks up where dispatch ends, and AI route planning for landscaping crews shows the same planning problem with job durations instead of drop-offs.

Checking it paid for itself after 60 days

Keep the baseline figures from your hand-planned day. After two months, compare three things: dispatcher hours per week spent planning, average finish time of your last stop, and failed or late deliveries per hundred. Put an hourly cost on the dispatcher's time. If the planner costs $190 a month and saves four dispatcher hours a week at $20 an hour, that is roughly 17 hours a month, or about $340 in time (illustrative arithmetic: 4 x 52 / 12 = 17.3 hours). Fuel and driver overtime are bonuses on top, and Routific's own 15% to 40% mileage claim is best treated as a ceiling until you have measured your own.

If none of the three moves after 60 days, cancel. Spoke bills monthly after its free trial, Onfleet offers monthly as well as annual contracts, and Routific's free tier lets you run up to 100 real orders a month before paying anything, which is another reason to prefer monthly over annual billing in the first quarter.

Questions before you start a route planner trial

Is route optimisation really AI?

Mostly it is a solver: software that searches for the shortest or cheapest order of stops under your rules (time windows, van capacity, driver shifts). Vendors often market that as AI. The newer, plainly AI parts are natural-language scenario tools and connections that let Claude or ChatGPT drive the planner. Judge the output on your own stops rather than the label.

Do I pay per driver with these apps?

Routific and Spoke Dispatch both state that drivers are unlimited and charge by orders or stops. Onfleet says every plan includes unlimited users and charges by completed deliveries. Route4Me's pricing page lists monthly plan prices without saying what they are per, so ask them in writing before you add a second driver.

What happens when my stop count spikes in the busy season?

Routific, Spoke Dispatch and Onfleet all bill the extra volume at a per-order or per-stop rate rather than blocking you. That means a peak month costs more but does not stop deliveries. Work out your busiest month's cost before signing, not your average one.

Can a spreadsheet and Google Maps replace a route planner?

For one driver and under about fifteen stops, usually yes. Once several drivers share a stop list, or customers expect time windows and live ETAs, planning by hand costs more in dispatcher hours than the software does. Price your own monthly stops at each vendor's per-order or per-stop rate to see where the crossover sits.

Further reads

• How Mobile Dog Groomers Use AI for Routes, Reminders and Rebooking — Routes plus reminders for a one-van service business.
• AI Ordering vs Delivery Apps: What a Takeaway Actually Pays — What delivery apps cost a food business, for comparison.
• How to Sync Stock Across Shopify, Amazon and eBay Automatically — Keep stock right before the orders reach the dispatcher.
• How to Use Shopify Sidekick to Run Your Store Faster — Use Sidekick to export and tidy the order list first.
• AI Maintenance Costs: What You Pay After an Automation Goes Live — Budget for what the tool costs after the trial ends.
• How Can AI Help Courier Services? Quotes, Dispatch and Proof — What AI does for a courier firm with one to five vans: quote replies, driver messages, day-plan checks and delivery records, and what stays with a person.
• Can AI Handle Pest Control Route Optimisation for Quarterly Customers? — How to cluster quarterly pest control visits by area with AI, then check the drive-time saving with a real routing tool.
• AI Dash Cams for Fleets: Cost, Privacy and Driver Consent — Hardware, subscription and contract costs for a small fleet, then the privacy notice, consent and no-emotion-inference rules to settle first.
• Cost per Drop: Work Out Delivery Cost From Route and Fuel Data — A step-by-step cost-per-drop calculation from your own route, fuel and driver-time exports, with a worked van example.
• AI Dispatch Automation for Small Delivery Firms: Where to Begin — A small delivery firm's first dispatch pilot: capture jobs, suggest assignments, handle exceptions and measure results.
• AI Tools for Fleet Management: Spot Fuel-Card Misuse in a Spreadsheet — A worked example: a fuel-card CSV and a location export, five flag rules, a sample exceptions list and how to verify each flag with the driver.
• AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.

Sources: Routific, Spoke Dispatch, Route4Me and Onfleet pricing pages, read 4 and 5 November 2026.