How Three Good Stops picks towns, what it costs, how break timing works, and what happens to your trip data. Straight answers, no fluff.
Every two hours or 100 miles is the standard advice, and it holds up. With kids, plan on 90 minutes. With a dog, no more than two hours. Three Good Stops uses those intervals by default and you can change them.
Eight to nine hours of actual driving is the ceiling for most people before judgment starts to slip. We default to nine and put an overnight stop in a real town when the day would run past it, then resume you at 8 a.m.
It walks your route in time, not distance, then scores candidate towns near each trigger point on what's actually there — parks and rest areas for stretch stops, restaurants for meals, hotels for overnights, dog parks and pet services for pet stops. Towns need to be far enough apart to be genuinely different options, and each pick shows you the reason it won.
Your first trip is free with no card. After that, three more trips are 99¢ as a one-time payment, or $2.99 a month (or $19.99 a year) if you drive a lot, which also saves and names your trips.
All 48 continental states, from a database of more than 1.6 million places across 142,000 towns. Alaska, Hawaii and Canada aren't in yet.
You can set your vehicle and its range, and the fuel or charging stops get placed on your real range instead of a generic 300 miles. Charger-by-charger reservations aren't in yet.
Yes. Saved trips get a read-only share link anyone can open without an account, plus a calendar (.ics) download so the stops land in your phone.
Nothing beyond running the planner. We don't sell it, we don't hand it to advertisers, and our page analytics are our own — no third-party trackers on the site at all.
No. Nobody pays to be a stop. If that ever changes it will be labeled in plain language on the page.
Type where you're leaving from and where you're going — see your stops right now. Free, no signup.
We write one new drive a week — three real towns, the drive math, what we would skip. Leave an email and we will send them as they go up. No more than one a week, unsubscribe in a click.
A road trip planner that picks the stops, not just the route · Road trips with kids: shorter legs, better stops · Road trips with a dog · EV road trips: stop on your range, wait somewhere decent · Thanksgiving driving: plan the stops before everyone else does