Footprint

Why this exists

Google Timeline used to live in your account. It now lives on your phone: the cloud copy was retired, and what is left is a file on a device that can be lost, wiped or replaced. For anyone who has been carrying a phone for a decade, that file is the only record of where they have actually been — and it is one dropped handset away from gone.

Footprint is the place to put it. Upload the export and the file becomes a map: every country, every city, every route between them, kept in an account you control rather than a folder you forget.

What you get

The map is the product. Zoom into a city and the GPS traces are there — the visits, the routes, the transport used to get between them — drawn over OpenStreetMap tiles. Above it sits a search that treats years of history as one dataset: filter by country, by city, by a date range, or by how you travelled, and the map answers immediately.

Alongside it are the numbers that a decade of movement quietly accumulates and nothing else counts for you: how many countries, how far, how many cities, and which way of travelling you actually use most rather than the one you think you do. The same journeys are also weighted by transport type, so the carbon cost of a year is a figure rather than a feeling.

Uploading more than once

A travel history is not a one-off import; you keep travelling. Export again whenever you like and Footprint compares the new file against what it already holds, taking only the visits it has not seen. Re-uploading extends the map rather than duplicating it, which is the difference between a tool you use once and one you keep.

Privacy is the whole premise

This is a product that asks for the single most sensitive file on your phone, so the position on it has to be unambiguous. Uploads are encrypted and scoped to your account. Nothing is sold, nothing is shared with a third party, and nothing is used to build a profile. You can delete an individual upload, your entire history, or the account itself — and deletion means deletion.

What it costs

Free to start, with a ceiling on the number of countries, and three paid tiers that raise it — up to unlimited. The full list is on the Footprint site, and the plans are monthly with no commitment. This is the one page on this site that quotes a price, and it does so because these are fixed public prices for a product anyone can sign up to in a minute, rather than an estimate for work that has not been scoped.