Open source by default
Released under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3. Source code, roadmap and changelog are public, and no closed-source module is required to run the core.
About
A small project, an honest scope
Wintertrace is a private open-source project. No company, no investors, no SaaS platform. One piece of software that runs on the operator's hosting and does one job — documenting winter service operations.
Why
Why this exists
The documentation burden is real, and the software built for it assumes a business most operators do not run.
Winter service is real work done in real conditions — early mornings, storms, narrow streets, anxious property managers. The documentation burden that comes with it is just as real: paper logs that fade, spreadsheets that nobody can find weeks later, photographs lost in group chats, and weather data that no one remembers to capture in time.
Most software available to small operators is built for the wrong shape of business. It assumes a fleet, a dispatcher, and an IT budget. It charges per seat. It puts the data in someone else's cloud. None of that fits a one-truck contractor or a property maintenance business with three drivers.
Wintertrace is the deliberate opposite: small, focused, self-hosted, and free.
It began as a favour. A colleague who runs winter service on the side asked for something that would record his work — a log of what was done, with a GPS track, as proof. That was the whole brief, and it is still the brief the software answers.
Who
Who builds this, and how
One maintainer, a public repository, and a licence written for exactly this question.
- Maintainer
- Michael, Passau, Germany
- First release
- v1.0.0 · 17 May 2026
- Latest release
- v1.1.9 · 29 July 2026
- Releases published
- 15
- Licence
- GNU AGPLv3 ↗
- Source
- noschmarrn/schneespur ↗
Wintertrace is maintained by one person, and the honest way to say that is plainly. It is not a company, and there is no support desk behind it. Full operator details are on the imprint, as German telemedia law requires.
What happens if the maintainer stops
It is the question a buyer should ask before installing anything, and there are three answers, none of which depends on a promise.
- The licence is designed for it. AGPLv3 with the full source published means anyone — you, your web agency, another operator — can take the code and keep it running. Nobody has to ask permission, and nobody can close it again.
- Your records are already yours. Operations, GPS points, photos and weather readings sit in a documented MySQL database on your own hosting, and every service proof has already been generated as a PDF. None of that stops working if development does.
- The pace is checkable rather than asserted. Every release is tagged and dated in public, so how actively the project is being worked on is something you can read for yourself instead of taking on trust.
How the code gets written
Wintertrace is built with Claude Code, steered through a planning workflow rather than typed function by function. The work is structured into milestones, slices and tasks, with research and tests around them, and every release is reviewed and run before it goes out. Plenty of bugs have been found that way that the assistant did not catch on its own.
One distinction matters more than the rest: this is software built with AI, not AI software. Wintertrace is ordinary PHP and MySQL. It runs no model, makes no predictions, and sends your operational data nowhere clever. The assistant is how the code gets written, not what the code does.
What that costs in tokens is public too — there is a running tally at riptokens.com ↗, which exists mostly for amusement and partly because a project that asks operators to check its claims should be checkable about its own workings.
Principles
Operating principles
What this project commits to, and what it declines to claim. Each one is a decision that can be checked against the code, the licence or the release history.
Self-hosting by default
Designed for the PHP and MySQL hosting most operators already pay for. No vendor cloud sits in any required code path, so the data stays on hardware you chose.
The software does not phone home
No analytics library is bundled. The only outbound calls a running installation makes are optional update checks and requests to the weather provider you configured.
Unlimited drivers, customers and operations
No per-seat pricing, no driver caps, no customer caps, and no feature held back to push you toward a plan. The limits are your hosting, not a price list.
The core stays free and usable on its own
Paid modules and optional services — managed hosting, installation, support — may follow. Where they do, the core remains complete without them rather than becoming a trial version.
Described only once it ships
If a feature is not in the software, this website does not imply it is. Anything still ahead is marked as planned and sits on the roadmap, not in the feature list.
No legal guarantees
Wintertrace provides documentation support. It does not certify, approve, or guarantee compliance with any regulation, and operational records are not a substitute for legal advice. The compliance page sets out what the software can and cannot support.
Brands
Two brands, one software
A reference point rather than a difference that affects the product.
The same software is published in German as schneespur.de, with vocabulary geared to German legal context, and in international English here as Wintertrace, with compliance wording suited to several jurisdictions at once.
Wintertrace is not a translation of Schneespur — the examples, the wording and the emphasis were written separately for each audience. The software underneath is identical, down to the release number.
What you can check for yourself
Nothing on this page asks to be believed. The repository, the licence and the release history are the argument, and all three are open.
Full operator information — name, address and phone number — is on the imprint page, as German telemedia law requires.