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Kardinal
Route optimization API built for developers and their agents
Kardinal is a route optimization API rebuilt for AI agents to call directly: typed SDKs, docs an agent can actually read. Built on 10 years of production route optimization, for the constraints that break most "demo" solvers (e.g. capacity-gated returns, self-closing consolidation loops, key-holder-only access windows). Test it entirely on your own: free tier, no sales call, no quote. The most complete API on the market: 93% of constraints covered, per our 2026 benchmark of 11 APIs.
Hey Product Hunt community 👋
I'm Cédric, co-founder of Kardinal.
For the last 10 years, we've solved route optimization for companies like DPD, GLS, and JCDecaux, as a service: they'd send us their data, we'd configure a solver, they'd get routes back. It worked well, but it meant months of sales calls before anyone could tell if it actually fit their case.
Somewhere in the last year, something changed in the requests we got. More and more weren't coming from ops teams anymore, they were coming from developers trying to wire an AI agent into their logistics stack. That exposed a problem we hadn't fully seen before.
An agent working from documentation written for humans produces code that compiles, API calls that succeed, and a model that's wrong. Not wrong in a way that throws an error. Wrong in a way that looks fine on a map and falls apart on the road. A plan can look perfectly optimized and still be physically impossible to run, because a large customer return (a sofa, a bed) picked up early in the route ends up blocking the vehicle for every delivery after it. Nothing in the API response flags this. The request was valid. The model just didn't capture the constraint that mattered.
So today we're opening Kardinal as a self-serve API, rebuilt specifically for that failure mode.
WHAT IS KARDINAL?
A REST API that takes your stops and vehicles and gives you optimized routes back in under 2 seconds. We cover 139 of the 149 real-world constraints in our own benchmark (93%), pulled from actual client cases: time windows, multi-depot, driver breaks under EU 561, cold chain, pickup-delivery pairing, heterogeneous fleets.
WHY IS IT DIFFERENT?
Most routing APIs are built for human developers to read. We rebuilt ours for agents using what we internally call harness engineering: multiplying the contact points between an agent and the right documentation, so it gets the right information exactly when it needs it. Concretely: an API doc dedicated to agents, a CLI, a typed SDK that makes certain mistakes impossible to write, and docs that explain when to use a parameter, not just what it does. We tested this internally before shipping it. Our own client optimization studies are now largely run by agents working alongside our solution engineers. On our internal benchmark, that took agent modeling failure rate from over 80% down to under 5%.
WHO IS IT FOR?
Developers and ops teams building routing into their own product or workflow, whether that's a human-built integration or an agent-driven one.
WHAT CAN YOU DO TODAY?
- Create an account and get an API key, no sales call, no quote
- Send stops and vehicles, get optimized routes back in under 2 seconds
- Re-optimize from live state in under a second if a truck breaks down mid-route, free, unlimited within 24h
- 1,000 free stops a month to test your actual case, at some of the most competitive pricing on the market
Billing is per optimized stop, not per vehicle or per user, so a team or an agent can recompute a plan as many times as it needs without worrying about the cost of iterating.
Would love your feedback, especially if you've tried wiring routing into an agent workflow and hit a wall, or fought with a routing API on constraints it didn't fully support. I'll be in the comments all day.
About Kardinal on Product Hunt
“Route optimization API built for developers and their agents”
Kardinal was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 10 upvotes and 9 comments, placing #48 on the daily leaderboard. Kardinal is a route optimization API rebuilt for AI agents to call directly: typed SDKs, docs an agent can actually read. Built on 10 years of production route optimization, for the constraints that break most "demo" solvers (e.g. capacity-gated returns, self-closing consolidation loops, key-holder-only access windows). Test it entirely on your own: free tier, no sales call, no quote. The most complete API on the market: 93% of constraints covered, per our 2026 benchmark of 11 APIs.
On the analytics side, Kardinal competes within API, Developer Tools and Artificial Intelligence — topics that collectively have 1.1M followers on Product Hunt. The dashboard above tracks how Kardinal performed against the three products that launched closest to it on the same day.
Who hunted Kardinal?
Kardinal was hunted by Cédric Hervet. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
For a complete overview of Kardinal including community comment highlights and product details, visit the product overview.
Cédric Hervet