WhimTrav

See it in action

01Why I built it

Three years into RV ownership, I learned the hard way that Google Maps doesn't know how tall my trailer is. The app routed me under an 11-foot underpass while I was towing a 12'2" travel trailer. I noticed in time — barely — pulled into a McDonald's parking lot, and proceeded to spend 45 minutes nervously eyeballing every bridge on the way to camp.

Existing truck-routing GPS hardware exists, sure. The good ones cost $400+ and have UIs that look like 2006. I wanted truck-grade routing in a phone app with a modern map and modern UX, and I wanted to not pay $400 to a company whose firmware hasn't been updated in five years.

WhimTrav is what came out of that. Tell it your rig's height, weight, and length. It routes around restrictions. The map shows 340,000+ RV-relevant places — campgrounds, dump stations, fuel stops with truck access, and overnight options. Multi-stop trip planning auto-inserts fuel stops at 80% of your stated range. And there's a hands-free Voice AI assistant you can just talk to while driving — ask it about nearby campgrounds, the weather along your route, or where the next dump station is. It's the GPS I wished I had three years ago.

02How it's built (for the curious)

The hard part of building an RV nav app isn't the UI — it's the routing data. Google Maps and Apple Maps don't expose truck restrictions on their public APIs. Most consumer mapping platforms don't, period. After evaluating options, I settled on HERE Maps' truck-routing API, which exposes bridge clearance, weight limits, and vehicle-class restrictions as first-class routing parameters. The same API powers commercial fleet software at companies that pay six figures for it; the indie pricing tier is generous enough to make consumer apps feasible.

The app is Flutter (Dart), one codebase across iOS and Android. Mapbox renders the map tiles and handles standard routing; the moment you set your vehicle height in your profile, route computation switches to HERE's truck-routing engine so parkway, clearance, and weight restrictions are respected. Trip planning is a multi-leg route solver that respects your fuel range, lets you drop overnight pins, and inserts campground stops without you having to manage state by hand.

The website (whimtrav.com) is a separate Flutter web build with the same routing engine — useful for desktop trip planning before a trip.

03Get it

Free to download and use — the free tier includes RV-safe routing, the full location map, and a starter allowance of Voice AI calls, with no time limit and no trial to expire. Two optional upgrades unlock heavier trip planning and more Voice AI: Weekend Warrior ($8.99/month or $89.99/year) and Road Warrior ($14.99/month or $149.99/year) — versus $400+ for a dedicated truck-GPS unit, or $99.99/year for rival routing apps.

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