Getting started
There is no sign-up step. Opening the app is the whole setup.
Opening Hatchure gives this browser its own anonymous session.
Everything you add or save is tied to that session, not to you
personally — so you can use every feature, forever, without an
account.
The app also installs to a phone home screen like a native app
(Add to Home Screen in your browser's share menu), which is worth
doing if you'll use it on a ride: it gets its own window and the
offline cache behaves the same.
Guided tours. Several features have a
"Walk me through it" button that drives the real interface rather
than showing screenshots — available for editing a stop, planning a
route, GPX upload, splitting a route into days, and offline areas. Find them in
Account → Help.
Finding stops
Pan, filter, search — or ask what's open right now.
Pan and zoom like any map. Zoomed out, nearby stops group into
numbered clusters; zoom in and they separate into individual stops.
Only what's actually in view is loaded, so panning across a country
doesn't drag the whole database with it.
Categories
Category chips filter the map to just the kinds of stop you care
about — supermarkets, gas stations, drinking water, vending machines,
lodging and campsites among them. The chips are shared between the
header and the sidebar, so the filter is the same wherever you set it.
Search
The search bar finds stops by name. If nothing nearby matches what you
typed, it offers to search that as a place instead and jumps
the map there — so one box handles both "find the Aldi I saw" and
"take me to Innsbruck".
Opening hours
Each stop shows whether it's open right now based on its own hours,
in the stop's local timezone rather than yours. Any stop can also
give you walking, cycling or driving directions.
At very low zoom the map shows the closest 2,000 stops to the centre
of your view and says so. That's a cap, not missing data — zoom in
for the rest.
Adding & editing stops
The map is shared. Anyone can improve it, including you.
Tap the + button, drop the pin where the stop
actually is, and fill in what you know. Opening hours are entered in
the stop's own local time, not yours — the app handles the conversion.
Who can edit what
- Stops you added — only you can edit or delete them.
- Stops imported from OpenStreetMap — anyone can fix or remove them, the same way OpenStreetMap itself works.
- Stops other people added — you can't edit them directly, but you can confirm or report them.
Confirming and reporting
If a stop looks right, "✓ Still here" on its detail
view logs a timestamped confirmation, shown to everyone as
"Confirmed by N people · last confirmed 3 days ago". Re-tapping
refreshes your existing confirmation rather than inflating the count.
If something's wrong, "Report a problem" flags it
(wrong info, permanently closed, duplicate, spam) without needing edit
rights yourself.
Deletions are recoverable. A deleted stop — yours or
anyone else's — sits in Account → Recently deleted for 30
days before it's really gone.
Planning routes
The core of the app: a line, a corridor, and the stops inside it, in the order you'll reach them.
Two ways to get a route
- Upload a GPX file — from Komoot, Strava, RideWithGPS or wherever you already plan.
- Plan it here — tap a couple of waypoints on the map and the route follows real paths between them, based on how you said you're travelling — bike, gravel, road, hiking, or trail and road running.
The corridor search
Either way, you pick how far off-route you're willing to look, and get
every stop within that corridor listed in the order you'll reach them.
Tick the ones you actually want; ticking a stop reroutes the line
through it.
Editing before you save
A planned route stays editable until you save it: drag a waypoint or
the line itself to adjust it, and tap the map to carry on further.
Start times and arrival estimates
Set a departure time and each stop gets an estimated arrival, and is
marked open or closed at arrival against it. These are estimates from
distance and an assumed speed — the app labels them as such rather
than presenting them as a schedule.
Keeping routes in order
With Supporter or Patron, My routes can be grouped into
collections — one for a tour, one for the loops near
home — each with a name and a colour, folded or open. A route is
filed from its card ("Move to…") or picked into a collection when it
is saved; everything unfiled sits under "Everything else". Deleting a
collection keeps its routes.
Exporting
Saved routes export as GPX for a bike computer.
Garmin users: Garmin Connect's web importer silently
drops the stops from an exported GPX, keeping only the line. The
route menu's export help covers the workarounds — a direct USB copy,
Garmin's POI Loader, or importing through a different app.
Multi-day routes
Because a 400 km route is not one day. A Patron feature.
Split a long route into riding days by placing overnight breaks along
it. Each day's arrival times then start from that morning rather than
accumulating continuously — without this, a 400 km route at 16 km/h
would estimate its last stop 25 hours in, a straight ride through the
night with a plausible-looking clock time on a stop you'd actually
reach the following Thursday.
Breaks are stored as positions along the route, so re-routing the
middle of a route keeps every break where it belongs and re-derives
which day each stop falls on. Days default to starting at 8am, and
you can set each one.
Sharing & collaboration
Two kinds of link, with deliberately different consequences.
View-only links
A read-only link lets anyone you send it to see the route and its
stops. They can't change anything. Revocable at any time from
Account → My routes. Available from the Supporter tier up.
Edit links
An edit link lets whoever holds it change the route's line and stops —
though not rename or delete it. Everyone editing sees each other's
changes live. Edit links expire after 30 days and are revocable at any
time. This is a Patron feature.
An edit link is the credential. There's no sign-in
to check against, so anyone holding the link can edit, and edits
aren't recorded against who made them. Only send one to people
you're actually planning with.
Offline use
Built for losing signal on a mountain, not for flaky home wifi.
Automatic caching
Stops and map tiles you've already browsed are cached as you go.
Revisiting an area with no signal shows what you saw before, and an
"Offline — showing saved stops" pill makes that visible rather than
leaving you guessing whether the map is current.
Downloading an area deliberately
To guarantee an area is available before you lose signal, use
Account → Offline areas to download stops and tiles around a
point you choose. The download runs in the background, so you can keep
using the app while it finishes.
Adding stops offline
A stop you add with no connectivity is queued rather than lost, shown
immediately with a dashed marker, and synced automatically once you're
back online. A genuine rejection — hitting the hourly rate limit, say —
is reported as an error rather than silently queued.
The first launch needs a connection. There's nothing
cached yet to work from. Everything above applies from your second
visit onward.
Keeping your data
Anonymous by default has one real cost, and two ways to avoid it.
Your stops, favorites and routes are stored against an anonymous
session that lives only in this browser. Clear your browsing data,
switch devices, or leave Safari alone for a week or so, and they're
gone. Neither fix below is ever required — the free tier works fully
anonymously, forever.
Recovery codes
Account → Keep your data generates a code like
RSUP-4KQ9-M2XD-7HTB. Entering it on another device moves
your stops, favorites and routes onto that session. No email, no
provider, nothing new stored about you.
Only a hash of the code is stored. The plaintext
exists once, on your screen. A lost code means genuinely
unrecoverable data — there is no reset link and support cannot look
it up.
Accounts
An email and password account works across devices and can be reset.
Registering is two steps — email, confirm, then set a password —
because a password can't be set on an unconfirmed address.
An account changes nothing about what you're allowed to do.
It's about keeping your data, not about permissions: you stay on the
free tier with the same limits. Signing in on a second device that
already has its own data offers to merge it, showing real counts, with
no default — declining leaves everything where it is.
Limits
What each tier allows, and why the limits exist at all.
Since anyone can add or edit without signing up, the free tier is rate
limited — enough for normal use, just enough to keep a shared,
open-to-anyone map from being spammed. Creating an account doesn't
change these; only paying does.
The route menu and My routes both show live usage ("3 of 5 saved
routes used"), read fresh from the server each time so it can't drift
from what a save will actually be allowed to do.
Nobody loses anything to a limit change. If a cap
moves below what you already have, your existing routes and stops
stay and you can keep adding to them. Limits apply going forward,
never retroactively.
If a subscription lapses
You keep every route you made. The free limits simply apply again
until you renew — nothing is deleted for a billing event, ever. A
cancelled subscription also runs to the end of the period you've
already paid for.
Privacy
What's stored, what isn't, and what changes if you pay.
- No account is needed for anything. The anonymous session is not linked to you personally.
- No third-party analytics or trackers. There is a small self-hosted usage log — which screens get opened — but not what you searched or typed, and no precise location beyond a stop's own coordinates.
- With an account, we hold your email address. That's the trade for cross-device access and password resets. It's used for signing in and nothing else: no newsletters, no marketing, never shared or sold.
- A supporter code is anonymous. Payment happens on Stripe's page, so the app never sees your name, email or card. Only a hash of the code is stored. Claimed without an account, we genuinely cannot tell who paid.
- A patron subscription stores more. It requires an account and stores a reference linking your user to your customer record at Stripe — that's what makes renewals, cancellation and refunds possible. Your card, billing address and the amount stay with Stripe.
- Your name is only on the supporter list if you type one in. Leaving it blank changes nothing else.
The map itself is shared: every stop you see was added by someone else
using this same app, or imported from OpenStreetMap, and anyone can add
to it.
Data & credits
Built on free, community-run services — used sparingly and only on request.
-
Map data and tiles — ©
OpenStreetMap
contributors, under the
Open Database License.
Some stops were imported from OpenStreetMap; the rest were added by
people using this app.
-
Place search and address lookup —
Nominatim,
used only when you search for a place by name or open a stop's
address, never automatically in the background.
-
Route planning —
BRouter
by Arndt Brenschede, which works out cycling, walking and running routes from
OpenStreetMap data. Called once each time you finish planning a
route, and needs a connection.
None of these are paid for or guaranteed, which is why the app calls
each one only when you ask it to.
