Transparency
How we calculate what Deadmiles saves you
Deadmiles shows customers numbers about time and money in two places — and they are different kinds of numbers. One is an estimate you build yourself; the other is measured from your own working day. Here is exactly how each works, including what we assume, because a savings claim you can't explain isn't a claim, it's a slogan.
1 · The Savings Calculator — an estimate, not a promise
The calculator on the home page uses three inputs you edit — your weekly stops, your hourly rate, and your current fuel price — multiplied against four constants we supply:
- 6 minutes of driving saved per stop versus running the same stops in random booking order. Deliberately conservative — this is our field experience as a solo operator, not a peer-reviewed constant.
- 1.5 hours per week of manual schedule sorting removed (rescheduling around pauses, holidays and conflicts).
- 4.33 — the honest weeks-per-month conversion.
- Fuel model: 30 km/h suburban average speed and 11 L/100 km van efficiency, × your fuel price. If your ute sips 8 L/100 km, your real fuel saving is higher; if you're in stop-start traffic at 20 km/h, lower.
Every number is yours to change, and the result is labelled an estimate. The calculator doesn't pretend to know your streets — it frames the shape of the win.
2 · The Evening Wrap-Up — measured from your day
Once you're a customer, the number stops being an estimate. Each evening, Deadmiles emails your day in numbers — and if route grouping beat plain booking order, it says "Deadmiles saved you X minutes today." That X is computed fairly:
- Same ruler, both sides. Your actual grouped route and the hypothetical "same stops in booking order" route are measured with the identical distance estimator and the identical 40 km/h urban speed. The number is purely an ordering win — never an artifact of a flattering model.
- Your day's real data. Where you clocked in, actual drive and job timestamps are used; legs without telemetry fall back to the planned durations and the email says "modelled", so measured and estimated are never silently mixed.
- Floored at zero, and quiet under five. If grouping didn't beat booking order today, we don't print "saved you −12 minutes", and we don't print "saved you 2 minutes" either — tiny numbers invite disbelief, so a tight day gets flat-day copy instead.
- One number everywhere. The wrap-up and your dashboard use the same engine, so the email and the app never disagree about your day.
What we won't claim
Straight-line distances overstate real roads equally on both sides — fair for the difference, not for absolute kilometres. 40 km/h and 11 L/100 km are assumptions, not measurements of your vehicle. And no software can promise a specific percentage: route density depends on how clustered your clients are, which is exactly what Deadmiles helps you create over time.
If you'd like the short version: the calculator is a shape, the wrap-up is a measurement, and both are computed the way we'd want ours computed before we bought something.