Who built this
Hey, I'm Lesley — the one person behind Runplanner. Developer by trade, runner by choice, and the kind of person who'd rather spend a Saturday tweaking a routing cost model than doing almost anything else. Runplanner started as a "I'll just build it myself" project and somehow turned into the thing I work on most evenings.
Why Runplanner exists
Honestly? I got fed up. Every running route planner I tried had something weird going on. One wanted my email before it would even show me a map. Another had a gorgeous heatmap that clearly thought I was on a bike — it kept sending me down fast roads with no shoulder. A third couldn't tell a real footpath from a muddy shortcut through a field, so what it called a 3 km walk turned into twenty minutes of puddle-hopping in running shoes. And pretty much all of them wanted to "sync" my routes and hand them back as insights I never asked for.
The final straw was stupidly small. I wanted to plan a loop from home — tap four points, get a route that preferred the cycleway over the main road, done. Instead I had three apps open side by side, copying coordinates between them, exporting a GPX file, importing it somewhere else. At some point I just thought: I know how to build this. Why am I not building this?
So I did. Tap to place waypoints, snap to real footpaths and cycleways, no account, no tracking, everything stays on your phone. The app I wanted to exist.
How it works under the hood
Runplanner turns a handful of map taps into a fully planned running route by snapping your waypoints to real roads and trails. The routing is handled by a self-hosted Valhalla instance running against OpenStreetMap data, with a pedestrian cost model that prioritises footpaths and cycleways over busy roads.
If the server is unreachable, the app falls back to a local A* pathfinding engine that downloads a small slice of OpenStreetMap data for the area you're planning in. That means route planning keeps working on poor connections, in unfamiliar places, or if the routing server is down for maintenance.
Everything you save stays on your device. Saved routes are encrypted at rest with AES-256, and no data syncs to any cloud account. There is no sign-up, no email, no password. This is deliberate — the fewer pieces of your information the app holds, the less it can ever lose, leak, or monetise.
What’s next
Here's the honest version — what's actually happening vs. what I'm just daydreaming about.
Actually happening: more work on the routing cost model (getting surface detection and footpath preferences right is a forever job), polish on the workout plan builder, and better import/export so people can move between apps without pain. A freemium tier will show up eventually once there are more users — but the core app stays free, and everything you already have stays free. That's a promise.
Maybe someday: iOS is the most-asked-for thing and since the app's built in Flutter it's not crazy, but I'm not going to put a date on it and pretend. Some lightweight route sharing (curated routes, not a social feed — I'm not building another Strava). And I keep poking at the idea of a proper "download this city for the weekend" offline mode for travel.
If you want something that isn't on here, just tell me. The roadmap genuinely shifts based on what lands in my inbox.
Get in touch
Found a bug, have an idea for a feature, or want to share a route you planned? I read every message. Email [email protected] or visit the contact page.
If Runplanner helped plan a run you enjoyed, the single best way to support it is to leave a review on Google Play. It's free, it takes a minute, and it genuinely makes a difference for a small app.