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Outpost.Co
The complete camping companion.

An iOS app for the whole arc of a trip — plan it, pack it by camp style, coordinate the crew, record the hike, log what you saw, and build a lifetime camping journal year over year. With a Foundation Models Ranger assistant on-device. iPhone first. Warm field-gear design.

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Status v0.1 · Coming soon

Platform iPhone · iOS 26

Pricing Free at launch

Tests green 189 / 189

No. 01 What it is

A camping app that plans the trip, runs it, and remembers it.

Twelve surfaces, one warm app. The shape mirrors how the trip actually goes — find a place, plan the days, pack like you've done this before, get the crew on the same page, record the hike, log what you saw, and watch a lifetime journal build year over year.

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Trips

Countdown dashboard for the next trip. Camp-style picker (tent, backcountry, car, RV, cabin) seeds everything. Budget tracking with cost-per-person splits, post-trip journal with photos and a 5-star rating.

⌘

Packing

The smart checklist. Seeds essentials by camp style, flags group gear so the crew can split it, weather-suggests extras from the forecast, weighs the load. Three view modes: checklist, cards, by person.

🜂

Meals

Day-by-day plan grouped by meal type. AI meal-plan generation. Auto-consolidates into one shopping list. Assigns a prepper.

⌥

Crew

Participants with travel coordination, ETA tracking, rendezvous notes. See at a glance who hasn't been given anything and the tally of unassigned group gear.

↗

Itinerary

Per-day activities by category (hike, drive, setup, rest). Sunrise/sunset baked in from trip coordinates. AI itinerary generation that matches trip style + weather.

⌖

Discover

240+ curated destinations + live OpenStreetMap campgrounds + NPS protected lands + Recreation.gov federal sites. Search, map, near-me, live weather, visit passport.

⌃

Hiking

Live GPS recording while you're out — distance, elevation gain, duration, route on a map. Saves to trip history with a custom name.

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Stats

Lifetime nights, trips, locations, styles. 10+ achievement badges. Year-over-year nights chart, cost insights, a map of every place you've camped.

✿

Nature

Wildlife and plant sightings logged per trip. Builds a lifetime field journal organized by location and date — a personal natural-history record.

⚙

Gear

Personal library of owned gear — weight, condition, storage location, brand. Search, filter, import straight into any trip's packing list.

✦

Ranger AI

Chat assistant for the camping question you'd text a more-experienced friend. Apple Foundation Models, on-device. Also generates meal plans, itineraries, gear suggestions.

◇

Learn

Offline guides — basics, skills, tips. Curated for first-timer through advanced. Reads on the trailhead without signal.

No. 02 The standout

The smart packing checklist

Pick how you're camping. Outpost.Co seeds the gear list tailored to that style.

Every trip starts from a base set of essentials (first-aid, headlamp, layers, water bottle, navigation), then layers on gear specific to the chosen camp style. Pick "backcountry" and you get the bear bag, water filter, fuel canisters, sleeping pad. Pick "RV" and the kitchen kit, levelers, sewer hose, and shore-power adapter show up instead.

Shared group gear — tent, stove, water filter, axe — is flagged so the crew can split it across the participants list instead of each person packing duplicates of the same heavy thing.

The whole template engine is unit-tested. 189 tests pass across 39 files, top to bottom. Including weight tracking (so you don't overload one car), sun and moon times (so you know when to start dinner), and the safety check-in system (so someone knows when you're overdue back).

Tent Backcountry Car camping RV Cabin

No. 03 On-device AI · Discover + Ranger

An assistant that actually understands what you're describing.

Two surfaces, one engine. The Discover tab matches a plain-English trip description against a 240+ destination catalog. Ranger is the in-app chat for the camping question you'd text a friend. Both run on Apple's on-device Foundation Models. No cloud roundtrip. Nothing leaves your phone.

What you ask

Plain English. The kind of thing you'd text a friend who'd been camping more than you have.

"Three nights, car camping with a 4-year-old, within four hours of Cape Girardeau, has a lake we can swim in."

"Solo backcountry, October, somewhere I won't see other people."

"How do I store food at a bear-country campsite without a canister?"

What you get back

Discover returns three to five matched destinations from the catalog — each with live weather for your trip dates, distance, and a clean detail view. Ranger answers in the chat, and can also generate a full meal plan, itinerary, or gear list from a one-line prompt.

On-device. Apple Foundation Models. No API key in the build, no request lands on a server, no third party sees what you searched for.

FoundationModelsLanguageModelSessionOn-deviceRanger chatMeal generationItinerary generationLive weather

No. 04 Beyond the trip · Lifetime layer

A camping app that builds something over years, not just one weekend.

Most planning apps are amnesiac — the trip's over, the data's gone. Outpost.Co keeps a lifetime layer that compounds: every hike GPS-tracked, every species you saw, every gear item you own, every campsite you've been to. None of it lives on a server. All of it is yours.

⌃

Hike recording

Tap record at the trailhead. The phone tracks distance, elevation gain, duration, and the route on a map. Save the hike under a name; it lives with the trip.

▥

Stats & badges

Nights camped, trips taken, styles tried, places visited. Ten-plus achievement badges across milestones. Year-over-year chart. A map of every place you've camped.

✿

Nature journal

Log a wildlife sighting or a plant ID with location and date. Builds a lifetime field journal — a quiet natural-history record of what's out there in the places you go.

⚙

Gear library

A personal catalog of what you own — weight, brand, condition, where it lives. Import any item into any trip's packing list. The reference replaces a spreadsheet.

No. 05 Why this one's different

No subscription: Free at launch. Pricing decided later based on what people actually use. If we ever do charge, existing users won't be retroactively charged for what's been free.
No servers: SwiftData on-device, with optional CloudKit sync between your own devices (now shipped at schema V11). When sync is on, data goes to your iCloud, not ours. Falls back to local-only if iCloud is unavailable.
No telemetry: No analytics, no crash-reporting service that uploads. We don't know who installs it.
On-device AI: Discover and Ranger both use Apple's Foundation Models. Nothing leaves the device for a suggestion.
Lifetime, not just trip-time: Hike GPS, nature journal, gear library, achievement badges — surfaces designed to compound year over year. The app gets more useful the longer you use it.
Designed for the woods: Warm "field gear" palette — sand and cream surfaces, field-olive brand, blaze-orange accent, heritage-camo header band. Adapts cleanly to light and dark.
Built by one set of hands: Solo from the studio. Third app on the lineup after Weather.Co and tmpo.

No. 06 Specs

Stack: SwiftUI · SwiftData · CloudKit · Apple FoundationModels · WidgetKit · ActivityKit · iOS 26
Bundle: com.kuhlman.outpostco
Schema: OutpostCoSchemaV11 — 16 SwiftData models with a versioned migration plan from day one
Tests: 189 unit tests across 39 files (PackingTemplate, PackWeight, HikeMath, Elevation, AchievementEngine, BudgetMath, CostInsights, DaylightPlan, DestinationCatalog, NPSService, OverpassService, CampfireWrapped, LaunchReadiness, OnThisDay, LearnContent, Itinerary, ReminderPlan, SunMoon, TripExport, TripProgress, PackingSuggestions, ConditionsSummary, DriveEstimate, and more)
Destinations: 240+ curated · live OSM Overpass (no key) · NPS API (proxied) · Recreation.gov RIDB (proxied)
Weather: Open-Meteo (no key) · cached for offline use · daily and hourly
Shipped surfaces: Trips · Packing · Meals · Crew · Itinerary · Discover · Hiking · Stats · Nature · Gear · Ranger AI · Learn · Onboarding · Settings · Widget · Live Activity
Build: XcodeGen vendored — project.yml is the source of truth
Status: v0.1.0 · TestFlight opening in the coming weeks
Roadmap: Trip sharing · collaborative editing · trail-difficulty inference · richer reservation availability · Android port

Want the first TestFlight invite?

Outpost.Co opens to TestFlight in the coming weeks. The list is small and friendly — early testers help shape v1. Send a line and you're on it.

Get on the TestFlight list →

Outpost.CoThe complete camping companion.