How do I plan the most efficient route for mivtzoim or deliveries?

For mishloach manos, matzah rounds, car-menorah parades, and mivtzoim visits, the request is always the same: here are the addresses and the drivers, make the routes short. Plain ChatGPT is the wrong tool for this. Ask it to route two hundred stops and it will refuse, stall, or make something up, because a language model is not a map.

If you can spend a little, purpose-built route apps do this well, and most offer a nonprofit discount. Tools like Circuit, Badger, Spoke, and OptimoRoute take a list of addresses and turn it into an optimized route, usually with a free trial so you can test first.

If you would rather not pay and you can plan ahead, the community wires up free mapping engines with a bit of AI help:

1. 01Write down the inputs and outputs. Your addresses and drivers going in, a route per driver coming out.
2. 02Have Claude Code build the script on top of free routing engines, so the actual routing is done by a real map tool and not guessed.
3. 03Test it on a small batch, then run the full list.

For a turnkey matzah or mishloach manos operation with volunteer assignments and live tracking, some shluchim use a ready-made service rather than building anything.

The tools, prices, and the do-it-yourself recipe are on the community wiki.