GPS & Vehicle Tracking

Why Self-Host Your GPS and Vehicle Tracking?

Commercial GPS tracking services store detailed records of everywhere you and your vehicles travel. Google’s Location History builds a comprehensive timeline of your movements that is retained indefinitely. Fleet tracking services charge per-vehicle monthly fees and store your route data, stop patterns, and driver behavior on their servers. This location data is among the most sensitive personal information — it reveals where you live, work, shop, worship, and who you visit — and it should not be stored on infrastructure you do not control.

Dawarich is a comprehensive self-hosted location history platform that imports data from Google Takeout, OwnTracks, and phone GPS apps, creating a personal Google Timeline replacement on your own server. OwnTracks Recorder collects real-time location updates via MQTT and stores them locally, supporting family location sharing, personal travel logging, and fleet tracking without commercial intermediaries. Teslamate provides detailed telemetry tracking for Tesla vehicles, recording driving statistics, charging sessions, battery degradation, and trip history that Tesla collects but restricts your access to. EVCC extends vehicle tracking into energy management, optimizing EV charging based on solar production and electricity prices.

For travel and activity logging, the ecosystem includes specialized tools. AirTrail tracks flight history and airport visits. JetLog provides pilot logbook functionality. LubeLogger manages vehicle maintenance records, fuel costs, and service history. Tracktor handles agricultural equipment and vehicle tracking. Reitti focuses on trip planning and route recording. The common advantage across all these tools is that your location data — where you drove, how fast, where you stopped, and when — stays on your own server rather than becoming a data point in someone else’s analytics platform.