Most rides that go wrong were planned well enough on paper. The route was there. The distance looked fine. You just didn't know the 10-kilometre gravel section was loose and steep, or that the only café on the loop closes on Mondays, or that the headwind kicks in at exactly the point you turn for home.
Ride time is scarce. Getting out for a four-hour ride takes half a day. A wasted one — bonked, soaked, pushing a flat through mud — isn't just unpleasant; it costs you the next one too. VeloPin is built around the idea that the planning phase should be long enough to catch those details, and the execution phase — the actual riding — should be as clean as possible.
Here's what that looks like in practice.
Start with a route — yours or someone else's
The quickest way to start is a blank map. Click any two points and VeloPin plots a cycling route between them using BRouter — a routing engine that understands cycling surfaces rather than just shortest-path logic. Keep clicking to extend the route, drag waypoints to reshape it, or draw the whole thing freehand. No account needed, nothing to install.
If you already have a route, VeloPin works with any GPX file. Drag one in from Strava, Komoot, Garmin Connect, or your own device and it loads instantly. From there you can inspect the full detail — elevation profile, surface breakdown, distance and estimated time — or jump straight into editing: add waypoints, trim the loop, reverse a segment.
If you'd rather start from someone else's work, the community library has publicly shared routes from other riders. Filter by distance, surface type, region or bike type, preview any route in full, then save a copy and make it your own.
Waypoints that actually survive the export
This is where most route planners fall short. You can add a café or a water point in the planning tool, export the GPX, load it onto your Wahoo or Garmin — and the waypoints are gone. Or they show up as a generic dot with no label. Or just one of them makes it across.
VeloPin exports waypoints in the format each device actually reads. For Wahoo Elemnt, that means the correct sym icons — coffee, water, summit, generic — in the right GPX structure. For Garmin Edge, it uses <type> and <cmt> fields that Garmin Connect imports correctly and passes through to the device display during navigation. Hammerhead Karoo and COROS are handled separately, each with their own quirks ironed out.
The result is that a waypoint you mark as a café or a resupply stop shows up on your head unit as exactly that, at the right kilometre, with the right icon — so you're not missing a turn or guessing whether that dot means "turn here" or "danger ahead".
Know the surface before you leave the house
Elevation tells you where it's hard. Surface tells you where it's slow, technical, or just unsuitable for your tyres. VeloPin pulls surface data from OpenStreetMap and breaks your route into asphalt, cobblestone, gravel, unpaved and unknown segments — shown as a colour-coded profile strip below the map.
If there's a significant gravel section on an otherwise road route, you'll see it before you go, not when you're rolling into it on 25c slicks. The surface breakdown also feeds into the estimated ride time, so a route with 15 km of loose gravel doesn't give you the same pace assumption as a clean tarmac loop of the same distance.
Time your ride around the weather, not the other way around
A single forecast — "30% chance of rain at 10am" — doesn't tell you much about a 100 km ride. The weather you start in is often very different from the weather you finish in, especially with wind.
Ride Radar is VeloPin's pre-ride weather tool. It walks the forecast along your actual route and times every point to when you'll arrive there at your pace. So rain at km 60 shows up as rain at 11:40, not as a percentage for somewhere near the start. Wind is calculated as actual headwind or tailwind on each segment, not just a bearing — you'll see where you'll fight it and where you'll get pushed.
The departure optimiser scores every possible start time by rain and headwind and marks the calmest window. Most "wrecked by weather" rides turn out to be an hour earlier or a reversed loop away from a good one.
Preview the ride in 3D before you go
Numbers and a coloured line on a flat map only tell you so much. The 3D flyover in VeloPin renders your route in terrain — hills, valleys, exposed ridges — and flies you through it at ride speed. It shows elevation labels, climb flags and an animated scrubber so you can pause and look at any section.
That first long climb at km 55 looks very different in 3D than it does as a gradient percentage on an elevation profile. You'll know where the exposed section is, how long the descent runs, and which way the terrain tilts at the turn. Riders who've previewed a route in 3D consistently report fewer navigation surprises — not because the route changed, but because they're mentally prepared for it.
Discover routes from other riders
The Community Routes section is a library of published routes from VeloPin users. Each one shows the full detail — surface breakdown, elevation, waypoints, photos and a description generated from the actual route data. You can filter by region, distance, bike type and rating, then save a copy to your own library and customise it before exporting.
Route sets let you group related rides — all your local loops, a week of touring stages, a list of "ones to do" — and share them or keep them private.
It runs in your browser
VeloPin doesn't require an app download. Open it on any computer, tablet or phone and it loads immediately. Your saved routes are stored in the cloud, so the route you planned on your laptop on Tuesday is there on your phone on Saturday morning when you're about to roll out.
The free plan covers route loading, surface analysis, elevation, waypoint planning and route export. VeloPin Pro adds the full Ride Radar weather tool with departure optimisation, the 3D flyover, Send-to-Phone direct transfer, and the complete Wahoo/Garmin/Hammerhead export with correct waypoint icons.
No account needed to start: load a GPX, plan the route, and see the surface breakdown in under a minute — free, in your browser.
The short version
VeloPin is a route planner that focuses on the logistics — what's on the road surface, what's in the weather, what waypoints you need and whether they'll survive the trip to your head unit. It doesn't replace the enjoyment of riding; it just removes the part where you roll out into something you could have seen coming. Ride time is scarce. Use it well.