The Big Sur guide costs nothing to download and will stay that way. Recording it, keeping the road status current, and putting routers where there is no signal all cost money, and sooner or later a thing like this has to find a way to pay for itself or it stops improving. We have not decided how. We are studying one idea first.
The guide talks about places to eat, sleep and stop along the road. We want to know whether hearing about a place makes people stop there, and by how much. So, with the Share my route switch on, the app notices when a drive stops at one of those places and for how long, and we count it. That is the whole study, and it runs through January 2027.
No money, credits or goods change hands between us and any place the guide mentions. No business is told anything about you; they are not told anything at all yet. The route of a drive is deleted after thirty days, and what we keep is a count per place with no route and no name attached. If any of this changes, the privacy page will say so before it does.
Turn off Share my route on the drive page. Nothing about where you went will leave your phone, and everything else about the guide works exactly the same.