I've taken road trips where I budgeted for gas and completely forgot that eating three meals a day on the road adds up fast, and ended up doing math in a gas station parking lot trying to figure out if we could afford one more night at a motel.
Before a recent trip, I gave an AI chatbot the actual route, how many days we'd be driving, roughly what my vehicle gets for gas mileage, and how many people were splitting costs, and asked it to build out a realistic budget covering gas, food, and lodging, broken down by day so I could see where the money was actually going instead of one lump estimate.
It asked me a few questions I hadn't thought through myself — were we doing sit-down meals or mostly gas station food, hotels or something cheaper, any toll roads on the route — and the budget it built out ended up being a lot closer to what we actually spent than my usual method of guessing a round number and hoping.
It also flagged that gas prices vary a fair amount by state along certain routes, which isn't something I'd have thought to account for, and suggested padding the estimate a bit for that instead of budgeting the absolute minimum and coming up short halfway through Texas.
None of this requires any special app or spreadsheet skill. You're just handing over the real details of your trip and letting something good at math do the part you'd otherwise be estimating on a napkin at a rest stop.
If you want the slow, no-jargon version of all this — the stuff I wish someone had handed me before I fumbled through it myself — that's exactly what I built On Ramp AI for. Check it out here.