If you sell telematics, your supplier’s per-vehicle fee is not a cost of goods — it is your margin, and it scales exactly as you do. This is the version where it does not.
The problem is structural, not commercial
You win the customer, you do the integration, you take the support calls. The platform underneath charges you per vehicle per month, so every account you add arrives pre-taxed and the tax grows with your success. Negotiating the rate moves the number; it does not change the shape.
Put it in arithmetic. White-label platforms are advertised from around $1.5 per vehicle per month, with resellers targeting 50–75% margins, while end-customer fleet software commonly sits at $25–45 per vehicle. Take a mid-market position — €4 wholesale, €9 retail — and your gross margin is €5, a healthy-looking 56%. Now grow:
| Vehicles under management | Annual revenue | Annual platform cost | Your gross |
|---|---|---|---|
| 500 | €54,000 | €24,000 | €30,000 |
| 2,000 | €216,000 | €96,000 | €120,000 |
| 10,000 | €1,080,000 | €480,000 | €600,000 |
The margin percentage never improves. You have built a business whose largest single cost line is indexed to your own growth, paid to a company that also sells directly. Every efficiency you find — better onboarding, fewer support calls, cheaper hardware — improves your side of the split and leaves the other side untouched.
Self-hosting changes the shape of the second column: it stops tracking the first one and starts tracking your infrastructure instead, which is roughly flat.
Worse than the money: what you can sell is decided upstream
The platform is your product but not your roadmap. A feature your customer asks for is a request you pass on and wait for, and a customer you lose over it is lost for a reason you could not act on. When the supplier ships something you had built around, or deprecates an API you depend on, you find out with everybody else.
Owning the source does not make you a product company overnight. It does mean the answer to “can you add X” stops being “I’ll ask”.
One deployment, every customer isolated
Routly is multi-tenant in the schema, not by convention. Every table is scoped to an organisation — vehicles, trips, users, geofences, reports, alerts — so one deployment holds all of your customers and none of them can see another.
- Roles and grants. Access reaches down to a single vehicle. A customer’s depot manager sees their depot; a subcontractor sees the three trucks they operate and nothing else.
- Per-customer report branding. Scheduled reports go out under each customer’s own logo and colours, which is usually the part of white-labelling they actually notice, because it is the part that reaches their own clients.
- Their own users. Invite-only accounts inside their organisation, managed by them, so onboarding a new user is not a ticket to you.
One honest limit, stated before you find it: the application interface itself is not skinned per organisation. The exports carry their brand; the screens carry yours. If your proposition requires each customer to see a wholly different-looking application, that is work on top rather than a setting.
Onboarding a customer, concretely
The sequence is short enough to be worth writing down, because “multi-tenant” often means “we will get to it”:
- Create the organisation. Everything below is scoped to it automatically.
- Point their devices at your ingest. Flespi, Traccar or a plain JSON webhook — no tracker is re-flashed.
- Import vehicles and assign them to groups.
- Upload their logo and set the report colours.
- Invite their administrator, who invites the rest.
Nothing in that list requires a deployment, a config file or a restart, which is the actual test of whether multi-tenancy was designed in or added later.
The licence you need
Routly is AGPL-3.0. Running it for your own fleet, unmodified, obliges you to nothing. Offering it to your customers over a network is the case AGPL Section 13 covers, and it would require you to publish your modifications under the same licence — including whatever integration work you consider your advantage.
| AGPL-3.0 | Commercial | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | Quoted per case |
| Self-host for your own fleet | Yes | Yes |
| Modify it | Yes | Yes |
| Publish your modifications | Required if served over a network | Not required |
| Resell or host for customers | Only under the same terms | Yes |
| Warranty and indemnity | None | Included |
| Support agreement | None | Included |
The commercial licence exists for exactly this position. It removes the source-disclosure obligation, so your branding and integrations stay yours, and it adds warranty, indemnity and a support agreement — the three things your own customers will ask you to stand behind when they read your contract. It is quoted per case rather than per vehicle, which is the entire point.
What you still have to build
Nobody is served by pretending a platform is a business. Reselling Routly does not give you:
- Billing. Invoicing your customers, dunning, tax. That is your system, and it should be, because your commercial terms are yours.
- Tier-1 support. You take the calls. The platform reduces them; it does not answer them.
- Hardware logistics. Sourcing, provisioning and replacing trackers.
- The sales motion. The product removes an objection about cost and ownership; it does not create demand.
What it removes is the per-vehicle tax, the roadmap dependency, and the risk that your supplier decides to sell directly into your accounts.
Your customers keep their trackers
Nothing is re-flashed and nothing is re-installed. Routly reads from Flespi, from Traccar, or from any gateway that can POST JSON, so a customer’s existing devices keep reporting exactly as they do now. That is also what lets you migrate one account at a time, running both systems in parallel until the data matches — a per-customer cutover rather than a big-bang one, which is the only kind you can sell to a nervous account.
What you operate
A Postgres, a ClickHouse, a Redis and one API, from a single compose file — on one host to start, scaled out when the fleet asks for it. On a production instance we measured, a position costs about 19 bytes on disk after compression, so ten thousand vehicles reporting all year is tens of gigabytes rather than a capacity project. The full list is in what you operate, and the arithmetic is in self-hosted fleet management, honestly costed.
Frequently asked
Can my customers have their own subdomain?
You can route one per organisation at your reverse proxy today. The application does not re-skin itself per organisation, so they get your interface at their address.
How many customers fit in one deployment?
There is no architectural limit; the constraint is ingest volume and query load, both of which scale with total vehicles rather than with the number of organisations. Start on one host and split when the numbers say so.
Do I need the commercial licence to evaluate it?
No. Deploy it, run it, put your own fleet on it, all under AGPL. You need the commercial licence at the point you offer a modified version to customers over a network.
What stops a customer from taking the source and leaving?
Under AGPL they would be entitled to your modifications if you serve them a modified version — which is one of the reasons the commercial licence exists. It is also worth being realistic: what keeps a telematics customer is the hardware fleet, the integrations and the support, not the inaccessibility of the code.
Can I see it before committing?
The demo is the real interface with no account required. Then tell us how many customers and how many vehicles between them, and we will quote against that.
We are in the same position
Routly is built by a company that licenses white-label products to integrators and runs telematics software for other people’s fleets. The multi-tenancy and the report branding are there because we needed them, not because a feature list said so — who we are.
