VANLYFEBathrooms & water
Restrooms, showers, drinking water, gyms and laundromats
Roam · Rest · Refill
Restrooms, water and free camps near you. Even offline.
A free, offline-first map for people living out of a van, a car, or without housing: tap what you need, see the closest places, and get there.
- Free
- No ads
- No tracking
- iPhone and Android
- 5 languages
35+open data sources, rebuilt on a schedule
36kinds of place across eight needs
50states, from your block to the whole map
5languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese and Filipino
Coverage
What do you need?
Eight needs, 36 kinds of place, one map. The same tiles open the app.
Power & Wi-Fi
Outlets, charging, libraries, cafés and Wi-Fi hotspots
Camping
Free & paid campsites, overnight parking and rest areas
Gas & auto
Cheapest gas, propane, dump stations and mechanics
Food
Pantries, free meals and markets
Help
Shelters, benefits offices, clinics, cooling centers, pharmacies and post offices
Money
Banks and ATMs
Things to do
Trails, bike trails, gear shops, events, theme & water parks, movies, geocaches, rivers and waterfalls
Each place carries what matters on the road: hours and whether it's open now, free or paid, ADA, 24 h, Wi-Fi, laundry, showers, fuel prices by grade, EBT acceptance, event dates, a street-level or aerial photo, and community notes and tips.
Product
Tap what you need. See the closest places. Go.
Finding places never needs an account, and every lookup runs on the phone, so the answer is there with or without signal.
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1Tap what you need
Pick a need, or narrow it to one kind of place: restrooms, showers or water.
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2See the closest places
On the map and in a list, closest first, or cheapest first for gas, by grade.
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3Go
Hours, photos and directions on every place, with a street-level look before you get there.
Trip tools
Plan the route. Check the place.
Places along your drive, a shortlist that works offline, and a real look at a spot before you go.
Along a route
Pick a destination and see up to 100 places within ½, 1 or 5 miles of the first 300 miles, in order along the way.
Saved places
Star a place to keep it on the phone: up to 500, listed closest first, offline, with no account.
Share
Send a place as a link that opens it in VANLYFE, Apple Maps, Google Maps or OpenStreetMap.
Photos nearby
Up to 12 photos taken within 150 m of the place, from Wikimedia Commons, Flickr and street-level imagery, pinned on the map where they were taken.
Look around, satellite and 3D
Google's Look around, satellite and 3D views of the place, plus its Google Maps card, right on the place card.
Tips from travelers
Public, anonymous tips with helpful votes and an optional “stayed overnight” date; reports hide them.
Also new: Search Google nearby when a place isn't in the list, Open now and Hide closed, a Free filter for camps, and laundromats, rest areas, pharmacies, post offices, rivers and waterfalls on the map.
Beyond the map
More than pins
The forecast, live layers and alerts, what's on this week, and where your benefits work, for wherever the map is.
Today
NWS forecast and alerts, air quality and pollen, sunrise, sunset, tonight's sky and tides, wildfires within 100 miles, earthquakes and local radio.
Live map layers
Rain radar, lightning, hurricanes and wind; road cameras, earthquakes and a crime heatmap; public lands, night lights and rivers.
Alerts
Opt-in notifications for NWS warnings, new fires within 25 miles and unhealthy air where the phone last was.
Events
Everything happening this week within 50 miles, by day, as a list, a photo grid or a map. Tap one and it opens on the map.
Benefits
Stores and restaurants that take SNAP near you, plus plain-language guides to CalFresh, General Relief, Medi-Cal, Oregon SNAP and the Oregon Health Plan in five languages.
Travelers
Opt-in: show yourself to other travelers who share, rounded to about 1 km unless you choose Exact. Report or hide anyone.
Why it wins
Works where the signal doesn't
Each state's places download once, a few MB, and every lookup runs on the phone with SQLite. Save map areas before you leave signal.
Offline-first by design
Places, filters and saved map areas keep working with no signal, and the national overview fills the map as you zoom out to the whole country.
Open data, continuously rebuilt
35+ sources, deduplicated by a scheduled ETL and published as static shards on a CDN. The phone does the query, so a lookup costs nothing to serve.
Photos before you go
Recreation.gov and The Dyrt photos, USDA aerials for every place, street-level photos (Street View, Mapillary, KartaView, Panoramax), Wikimedia Commons and Flickr photos nearby, and community photos.
Five languages
English, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Vietnamese and Filipino, across the app, the guides and every category name.
Built on open data
- OpenStreetMap
- Recreation.gov
- US Forest Service
- BLM
- USDA SNAP
- HRSA
- IMLS
- National Park Service
- National Weather Service
- GasBuddy
- Eventbrite
- Meetup
- NOAA
- USGS
- Wikimedia Commons
- Travel Oregon
- and more
Your location stays on your phone
Unless you opt in to Travelers. Weather requests use coordinates rounded to 0.01°.
Accounts are optional
Finding places never needs one. Sign in only to add spots, post photos or share your position.
Community moderation
Report a place, a photo or a traveler, block uploaders, and suggest edits that go through review.
Self-hosted backend
Accounts and community posts live on our own server, with Play data-safety and App Store privacy labels filled out truthfully.
Accessible
Automated accessibility audits on every screen: contrast, text size, touch targets, VoiceOver and TalkBack labels.
Delete any time
Community › Settings › Account › Delete account removes your account, profile, messages, photos and traveler profile, or ask by email.
Get the app
Free on Android and iPhone
VANLYFE is in beta. Android installs straight from this page; iPhone installs through Apple's TestFlight.
Android
Android 8.0 or newer on a 64-bit phone
- Open this page on your Android phone and tap Download for Android. If Chrome warns about the file, tap Download anyway.
- Tap Open when the download finishes. If that button is gone, open vanlyfe.apk from Downloads in your Files app.
- If your phone says it isn't allowed to install unknown apps from this source, tap Settings, turn on Allow from this source, then go back.
- Tap Install, then Open. If Play Protect warns about the app, tap More details, then Install anyway.
To update, download and install again from this page; the new version replaces the old one and keeps your saved places. If you already have VANLYFE from Google Play, uninstall it first.
iPhone
iOS 17 or newer, through Apple's TestFlight app
- On your iPhone, install TestFlight from the App Store.
- Come back to this page, tap Join the iPhone beta, then View in TestFlight.
- In TestFlight, tap Accept, then Install.
New versions show up in TestFlight with an Update button. Each beta version stops working 90 days after it comes out.
For partners
The pitch deck
The problem, the product, coverage, trip tools, live layers, why it wins, trust, and where VANLYFE goes next, in eleven slides.
The ask
Introductions to outreach organizations and vanlife communities for the launch, feedback on the benefits guides from people who use these programs, and partners with campground or fuel data to license.