Gaia GPS Reviews 

They are refusing to cancel my service and give me a prorated refund.

BEWARE - predatory billing behaviors!

I started a free trial on July 10th 2025 and could not get the program to work properly on my phone. Chatting with tech didn't help. I tried to cancel my account and thought I did, but never received a cancellation. I was charged $64 and now GAIA won't refund my money for a program I never used.

Gaia seems to currently have a bug with subscription windows where each subscription has an expiration date set based on the last expiration date. However, this means that people subscribing for a year don't get a full year's subscription unless they renew immediately after the last expiration.

For example, if your subscription expires and you go 6 months without the subscription and then subscribe again, the expiration date would be set to 6 months from that time. You still pay for a year, but you get 6 months. I tried reporting this problem but it was not addressed.

Fair Warning: Don’t write a note critical of Gaia! I complained about the loss of ability to send routes to my watch and they kicked me off the site even though I had 2 weeks remaining on my subscription. Real Micky Mouse organization

How’s this for the height of stupidity:

With Gaia GPS you can download maps and view them with no internet connection. But you can’t search for anything without an internet connection. This is true for any map you download (raster, vector, or doesn’t matter).

I used to recommend this app. Now I hate it, No customer support! I have had it refuse to open when out in the wilderness without a fresh login. I was stuck out there with zero access to my paid mapping program and GPS. The screen indicated the required login was for my safety. Ha, it was just the opposite. I now have a new phone and can not get it installed. Actually it did install but will not let me login. I have uninstalled and reinstalled 5 times. Online support requests the same info over and over with no help. I am merely being generous with the 2 star rating because it used to be useful. All this great fun is after the huge increase in price(auto-renewal). If the customer service would respond or preferably I could talk to a human, the review may change.

9/13 Update: Gaia reached out- Jed was extremely responsive and helpful. They explained that they're unable to refund when it runs through Apple but offered to send a refund; I had spent the morning contacting bank and Apple, and Apple had already agreed to refund me so it wasn't necessary, but I appreciated it. Bumping my rating up to 3 stars due to them reaching out and trying to make it right.
9/12 I was charged $39 for a Legacy membership on 9/4/24 through Apple store and subsequently realized that I'd lost access to my Premium features. I wasn't thrilled that the price increased 50% but I had already heard about it and I felt that this was still a good investment considering the many years I have invested in learning the software and making pins for hiking and hunting. I contacted Gaia's "email customer support" numerous times. I was told repeatedly that they had no record of my being charged(!?!) I decided to just upgrade so that I could access the Premium features and they charged me the full $59, literally EIGHT days after I already paid them $39. I am so frustrated. They are good about responding to the INITIAL request for help via email but if I respond to them, I get nothing, rendering it useless. I wish I had jumped ship when they sold the company. The app keeps declining and becoming less user-friendly and the customer service is nonexistent. This is so depressing because it wasn't like this originally; my husband contacted them years ago when the app got buggy while he was on a self-guided elk hunt in the CO mountains and he spoke with a person who got him up and running immediately. God help you if you rely on them in a life and death situation now.

The first time I used this application, I found it very interesting for my use, i.e. creating routes on which I identify archaeological sites and take photos of them. These photos are well rendered in the GAIA application. I exported the routes and their attached photos in the 3 formats offered, gps, kml and GeoJSON, and imported them into Google Earth Pro. Everything worked fine, and my images were clearly visible on the roads. However, a few days later, the roads were exported with the photo waypoint, but no photos. After checking the contents of the kml or gpx, the photo link was missing. After contacting GAIA support, I was told that this was indeed an error, but that it was not yet scheduled to be corrected. In short, there's nothing to see. Too bad.

The app works well. Several irritating problems, but no show stoppers. However, a $20 increase in annual cost since last year betrays the fact that the corporate greed monster has struck again.

Possibly it's because Outside took them over. Who knows?

AllTrails may be a better option once you compare them.

I have been a Gaia GPS user since the app was first launched (using it for wildland fire fighting) and continue to use it to this day (for hiking and boondocking). While the app still has utility, each update and upgrade has made it more difficult to use, bloated and buggy. Downloading maps has always been a major downfall and is even worse now - often requiring multiple restarts of the app over extended periods of time. I just downloaded a map, checked it was fully cached (when offline), went to download another map and the first one started redownloading, thus slowing the second map download. It's taken all morning for 4 maps (about 1.5 GB) to download on a 5G system clocked at around 120 mbps (no VPN - Gaia slows download speeds). If you switch to another app and come back to Gaia the map position you had been viewing will have changed to a seemingly random location and you'll need to relocate it. The status bar in recent versions takes up 1/8 of the screen. The original version took up less than half of that. The map list on the web map has never been sorted and still contains maps that are no longer available. The app cannot search for DMS coordinates - only decimals. I've never been able to get the compass reading to read correct bearing. When plotting routes the route paths sometimes do not conform to roads and trails. Bottom line: if you are a hard core, outdoor map user it may be worth investing money in but beware - you will also be increasingly investing time getting the app to function like it used to and like it should. Also, they just increased the pro price despite the app working less well compared with previous versions. TrailBehind (developer): If you're reading this: stop monkeying with the app, fix its faults (including the web map) and also bring back the old online user discussion and suggestion space!

I quite liked this App until I tried to edit a route I had made - then I found out that it does not automatically save the changes I made even though I clicked the 'save' button. I did some research and found many other users complaining to Gaia about this flaw. The only 'work-around' is that, after editing the route, you have to go to the end point and add another end point - at the same time keep your eye on the route distance to see if it increases - if it does then you know the App has recalculated the route and you can then save it - but now your end point is different. Not great Gaia! Why can't this be fixed?