GPSies.com

» see gpsies.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Klaus Bechtold put GPSies online in August 2006 to solve a problem that was very specific to that moment. Handheld GPS units and the first navigation-capable phones all produced tracks, every manufacturer had settled on a slightly different file, and there was nowhere obvious to put a recorded route so that somebody else could load it onto different hardware. GPSies took the upload, converted between GPX and KML and whatever else a device had written, and gave the file back.

The route planner came after that, and it is what made the site sticky. You could draw a line across a map, watch it snap to actual paths, then export the result to a Garmin before leaving the house. Hikers used it. Cyclists used it more. Paragliding and kayaking and cross-country skiing all had corners of it too. None of this cost anything and most of it did not require an account.

By August 2017 there were 4.8 million tours on it from 570,000 registered users. That is a large number for a site with no advertising department, no funding round and, for most of its life, one person writing the code.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ one developer ~

The comparison everybody in the German outdoor forums made was to Komoot and Naviki, both of which were companies with staff and investors and a paid tier. GPSies stayed a hobby project to the end. That is why it was free, why the interface aged the way it did, and eventually why it sold, because the maintenance load on a site holding millions of user tracks does not shrink just because the person carrying it has a day job.

Coverage followed the same logic. The density was in German-speaking Europe, where the users were, and everywhere else the map was only as good as the last person who had walked somewhere with a device switched on. Search for a route around Ankara or along the Aegean coast and you would find whatever a handful of visiting cyclists had uploaded, which is the honest condition of every crowd-drawn map and the reason the big ones ended up buying the small ones.

~ the AllTrails transfer ~

AllTrails is based in San Francisco and backed by Spectrum Equity. It put out the announcement on 30 July 2019 and the framing was European expansion: strong already in North America, it wanted trail coverage across the EU, which GPSies had spent thirteen years accumulating. Bechtold's quote in the release is one line about a mutual goal of helping people embrace the outdoors.

The handover completed on 16 August 2019. Tours moved into the AllTrails database unless the person who had uploaded them objected. Accounts moved with them. To this day gpsies.com is a redirect that still carries a referrer tag naming the site it used to be. What did not survive was the thing the site had existed for in the first place. Free GPX download and the printable PDF of a route were not offered on the other side, so a decade of German cyclists discovered that their own tracks were now behind somebody else's product decisions.

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