Velorki

Get lost, never stranded. Velorki routes, searches and navigates your ride with zero signal, free. Optional Plus unlocks the online extras: AI route planning, Strava sync and shared rides.

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Inspiration

Your bike app dies right where the ride gets good. Up a mountain pass, deep in the woods, across a border: the map goes grey, rerouting spins, and search needs a signal you don't have. And the features you actually need are often behind a paywall.

So I built the opposite. Velorki (velo for bike, orki from Orkitec) does everything your ride needs right on your phone, with or without a signal.

What it does

  • 🗺️ Plan anywhere. Road, gravel, touring or MTB routes, or just ask for "a 60 km loop via the lake".
  • ☕ Find stuff offline. Type "water" and get the nearest taps. Cafés, bike shops and campsites work the same way.
  • 🔊 Get talked through every turn. Miss one and Velorki gets you back on track.
  • ⌚ Heart rate without extra gear. Your Apple Watch is enough, no chest strap needed, and your next turn shows on your wrist.
  • 📈 Record every ride. Speed, climbing, splits and heart rate, exported to wherever you like.

Download your region once and all of it works in airplane mode. No account, no ads.

Velorki Plus is the optional upgrade for the online extras:

  • ✨ AI route planner: say "40 km, mostly gravel, café stop" and get a route
  • 🔄 Strava & RideWithGPS sync
  • 🔗 Share routes with a link

How I built it

Flutter for iOS and Android, plus a native Apple Watch app. Route calculation normally happens on a server, so I ported BRouter, a proven open-source bike routing engine, to run directly on the phone. It gives exactly the same results as the original.

RevenueCat runs Velorki Plus: the paywall, the free trial, monthly and yearly plans, and restores. A small server checks every Plus request against RevenueCat, so the AI and partner features stay locked unless you're subscribed.

Challenges

  • Squeezing a routing engine into a phone without changing a single route it produces
  • Offline search that finds the nearest water tap in milliseconds, with no server
  • Recording that survives whatever iOS and Android do to shut down GPS apps in the background
  • Drawing a fair paywall line. If it runs on your phone, it's free; if it needs the cloud, it's Plus.

What I learned

With an AI assistant, you can build in weeks what used to take months or years. Velorki went from the first commit to App Store submission in about 2.5 weeks: an iPhone app, an Android app, an Apple Watch app, a website and a server.

The trick is to let the machines check each other:

  • Test first, always. Every feature starts as a test. The AI writes the code, and the tests tell us both whether it really works.
  • Automate everything. Builds, device tests on Android and iOS, App Store screenshots, the preview video and releases all run on their own.
  • Keep the judgement human. The AI does the typing, while I make the calls on design, the product and what "done" means.

What's next

Send routes straight to Garmin and Wahoo bike computers, route with no downloaded tiles at all, and launch on Google Play.

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