Are you enjoying this app? Maybe you would consider donating to support its continued development?

Hi everyone,

With v2.5.0 that just went live I made a change that I want to explain more fully than just a few bullet points on the changelog. With this new release, some features are now behind a paywall that asks for donations. Donations start as low as $1 a month and every bit helps offset costs.

I’ve tried to long put off any form of monetization, but traffic has grown significantly over the past few months and there are now very real costs to running this app. I’ll always be happy to give my time towards this labor of love, but as costs pile up on a credit card statement my wife can see, I’ve decided to make this change.

As an alternative I have considered putting up ads. The offset to costs ads could create would likely be meaningful but as a product purist I want to continue to put this off. I hate how the internet has become an optimization exercise to steal everyone’s attention in the name of advertising. For as long as I can, I want to avoid adding to that problem, but ads are likely coming eventually to the logged out free tier.

The other reason I’ve added the paid tier is that there are a lot of features I’m interested in building that have real costs associated with them from the get go and this will allow me to finally implement them. The best example is showing elevation changes. This is a long requested feature and a key part of racing. Elevation changes make great tracks. What would Eau Rogue be without that climb up the hill? How iconic is Turn 1 at COTA? I want to add this element to the Race Track Designer, but the underlying API service to calculate the elevation of hundreds of point on a track times thousands of users gets expensive fast. That’s just one example, there are many others as well.

Finally I want to say, the outpouring of support from the community that is developing around the app has been incredible. There are now thousands of users across more than 150 countries. The fact that so many people are like me in that they walk down the street and ask themselves “would a race track fit here?” Is incredible. I respond to every single email. The best way for me to improve the app is through feedback from the users, so keep it coming.

Cheers,
Kyle