RiderLogThe calimoto app: what it does well, and what I use instead
What the calimoto app is
calimoto is a motorcycle navigation app built around curvy-road routing: it plans the twisty way rather than the fast way, records the ride, and keeps a map of roads you have covered. The free tier gives you the basics; the Premium subscription unlocks offline maps and the full routing features. For turn-by-turn on a fun road it is genuinely good. What follows is the setup I use instead for everything around the ride: the places, the record, and the story.
If you are leaving calimoto, decide first which half you are replacing. Most riders I hear from leave over two things: the yearly bill for an app they only use in riding season, and being sent down a closed road. I cannot fix either, because RiderLog is not a navigation app. For turn by turn, Apple Maps and Google Maps are free, know about closures and work offline. What I built is the other half: a map of places worth riding to, and a record of the ride once you have done it.
The other half of the job
RiderLog does not route you. It shows you places riders actually ride to, records the ride with your phone locked and in your pocket, and gives you a card at the end. Keep your navigation app for the directions.
Free to download. Your rides stay on your phone.
What calimoto is genuinely good at
Curvy road routing and round trips. That is a hard engineering problem and calimoto solves it better than a general purpose map does. If the round trip generator is the reason you subscribed, and you still use it most weekends from April to September, none of what follows applies to you. Keep it. The rest of this page is for riders who looked at the renewal notice and could not remember the last time the routing earned it.
That is the sentiment underneath most of the switching. "Charging to track rides now?" one rider wrote on the App Store, and the complaint is not really about the amount. It is about paying a yearly rate for a seasonal hobby, and about a routing feature that used to feel like magic and now feels like something the phone should already do.
Is there a free alternative to calimoto?
Not for the routing, no. No motorcycle specific navigation app has a free tier worth riding on any more, and the ones that advertise a free download mostly mean a free account. What is genuinely free, and already installed, is Apple Maps and Google Maps. Neither of them will hunt corners for you. Both know about roadworks and closures, both reroute without drama when you miss a turn, and Google Maps with avoid highways switched on gets closer to a back road day than most riders expect. That is the trade: you give up curve hunting and you get a router maintained by a company with a real mapping budget. RiderLog is free to download, and the places map, the check-ins and the ride log cost nothing, but it does not navigate, so on its own it is not the answer to this question.
The closure complaint I cannot answer
"Still navigating me through closed roads" is the single most repeated line in calimoto's low reviews, and a German rider put the frustration more bluntly in a review that translates to "A navigation app that does not navigate". I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of thing a competitor page overstates. Routing around closures means ingesting live roadworks feeds for every country you operate in, and that is expensive in a way one person or one small team cannot match. It is also the reason my advice is not "use my app instead". It is "let the big map companies do the routing, because closures are their problem and they pay people to solve it".
So what did I build instead
Two things calimoto was never really for.
The first is where to go. Open RiderLog and the map is already there: cafes, viewpoints, temples, sunset stops, the places riders actually ride to rather than a generic points of interest dump. You can search anywhere in the world, tap any spot on the map, and add it in one step. There are no star ratings to game and no sponsored pins, because a place should earn its spot through someone actually turning up. Build a list, share it with a link that opens in a browser with no app needed, or follow a list another rider made.
The second is what you did. Hit record, lock the phone, put it in a jacket pocket or a tank bag, ride. The rides live on your phone and, when iCloud is on, in your own private iCloud storage, so they follow you to your next phone. If the phone dies mid trip, the ride is recovered rather than lost. At the end you get a card with the satellite map, the route trace, the stats and your photos layered on top, or a replay reel that draws the route across the map.
In RiderLog
Free to download, with the places map, check-ins, ride recording and the ride log included. Pro removes the watermark from cards and videos, lifts the limit on place lists, adds a bonus weekly challenge and protected weeks, and it bills only through Apple Subscriptions, so you cancel it the same way you cancel anything else on the App Store.
Does RiderLog do curvy road routing?
No, and it is worth being blunt about the scale of that no. There is no route engine, no waypoint editor, no round trip generator, no turn by turn, no voice guidance and no CarPlay. What RiderLog does is the step before and the step after. Before: pick a few places off the map, put them on a day loop, and hand the route to Apple Maps, Google Maps or Waze, whichever one you already use. After: it records the ride, keeps the photos attached to the route, builds a passport of every place you have checked in to, and fills in a scratch map of the roads you have actually covered. If you want an app that picks the corners for you, keep a navigation app on the phone. I would rather say that plainly than sell you a router I have not written.
What happens to my calimoto tours if I stop paying?
Get them out before the renewal date, not after. Export every tour and every recorded ride you care about as GPX while the account still works, because export is often one of the first things to disappear when a plan lapses, and a tour you cannot download is a tour you no longer own. Once the files are safe, cancel through the App Store: open Settings, tap your name, tap Subscriptions, pick the app, tap Cancel. If you paid on a website rather than through Apple, cancel with the company directly, because Apple has no record of that charge and cannot stop it. I wrote the whole sequence out, in the order that actually works, in the guide to cancelling a motorcycle app subscription, and the file format side is covered in the GPX guide. RiderLog imports GPX from Profile, so the tours you rescue can land somewhere.
The setup I actually ride
Apple Maps or Google Maps when I need directions, which is less often than I expected once I stopped treating every ride as a route to be planned. RiderLog in my pocket, screen off, recording the whole time. A short list of places I want to hit saved before I leave the flat. Two apps, two jobs, one of which I do not pay for and one of which I wrote.
That is the shape most riders leaving calimoto are looking for, I think. Not a cheaper router. Permission to stop paying for a router at all, and keep the part of the app they were actually opening: the map of somewhere worth going, and the record of having been.