Should you build your own HuntStand?
Mobile mapping app for hunters: property boundaries, stand and camera markers, wind and weather overlays, and shared hunt logs for a hunting club.
Drawing pins on a map and logging what you saw at dawn is a trivial build, and an agent will hand you a working offline map in an afternoon. The part people actually pay for is the data underneath: nationwide parcel boundaries with owner names, recent high resolution aerial and topo imagery, and radar and wind layers stitched into one mobile app that works with no signal. That parcel layer is licensed, not scraped, and the imagery bill is real. Add the club side of it, where four people share the same map and see each other's stand check-ins live, and your local-only build stops covering the use case. Build the personal scouting notebook, keep paying if you need to know who owns the ridge behind you.
ENOriginal research content in English. Original prompt preserved in English.
Build a personal, offline-first hunting scouting map as a PWA. No accounts, no server, no telemetry. All data stays on the device.
Stack, no substitutions:
- Vite + React + TypeScript
- MapLibre GL JS for the map
- Dexie (IndexedDB) for all storage
- vite-plugin-pwa for installability and tile caching
- Tailwind for styling, keep it plain and thumb-friendly
Map:
- Base layers switchable: satellite and topo from MapTiler using VITE_MAPTILER_KEY from .env, plus an OpenStreetMap raster fallback that needs no key
- "Download this area" button: prefetch tiles for the current viewport at zoom 12 to 16 into the service worker cache, show progress and cache size, allow clearing
Data model in Dexie: properties (name, GeoJSON polygon, acres computed), markers (type: stand, blind, camera, plot, trail cam, gate, sign, custom; lat, lng, notes, photo blob), tracks (recorded GPS line, timestamps), sits (marker id, start, end, wind dir and speed, temp, moon phase, sightings list with species, count, sex, time, free notes).
Features:
- Tap map to add a marker, choose type from an icon grid, attach a photo from the camera input
- Draw or import property polygons: file import for GeoJSON, KML and GPX, since county GIS portals hand those out. Show acreage.
- Record a walk: watchPosition into a track, works with screen on, stop and save
- Wind overlay: fetch current and hourly wind direction and speed from Open-Meteo for the map center, draw an arrow and a compass rose, and shade a simple downwind cone from any selected stand so it is obvious which stands are burned today
- Sunrise, sunset and moon phase computed locally with suncalc, no API
- Sit log: start a sit from a stand marker, it snapshots wind, temp and moon, then log sightings as you go
- Export and import everything as one JSON file, plus GeoJSON export of markers and tracks
Explicitly out of scope: parcel boundaries or landowner names (no legal source to pull from, the user imports their own), multi-user sharing, sync, push notifications, deer movement predictions.
Seed with two example markers and a sample property polygon so the UI is not empty. Write a README that states plainly what it does not do.The prompt opens pre-filled in your agent. Review it before running. · this prompt is generated from the build plan · improve it via PR
What would building your own look like?
An offline-capable PWA map where you drop stands, cameras, food plots and trails, draw your own property polygon, log sits with wind and moon data, and export everything as GeoJSON.
What you will need
- A MapTiler or Mapbox key for satellite and topo tiles, or plain OpenStreetMap tiles if you accept no imagery
- County or state GIS parcel exports downloaded by hand for the properties you care about
- Open-Meteo for forecast and wind, no key needed
- A phone that will actually install a PWA and cache tiles
Hunters pay for two things a personal build cannot fake. First, knowing exactly where a boundary line is and whose name is on the deed, which is a legal question as much as a hunting one, and that answer lives in licensed parcel data refreshed constantly. Second, the group: a lease with five members needs one shared map where everyone's stands, cameras and sit logs are visible and current, and the sharing has to work from a truck with one bar of signal. The mapping toy is cheap. The data subscription and the sync are the product.
xNationwide parcel boundaries and landowner names, which are licensed data you cannot regenerate
xFresh leaf-off aerial imagery and multi-source topo layers across the whole country
xLive sharing with a hunting party: shared markers, check-ins, and who is sitting where right now
xNative app polish offline: reliable background GPS tracks, tile prefetch, battery behavior
xWeather radar, rut and deer movement forecasts, and the constant map data refreshes
Nothing worth pointing at. That’s why the prompt exists.
How much does HuntStand cost?
- Monthly billing
- $2.92/mo$2.92/mo
- Per year
- $35.04/yr$35.04/yr
- On a Brazilian card, with 3.5% IOF
- R$15.26/moR$183/yr
Saved to My list. You will see a notice on this site when the price changes.
You complete the purchase on HuntStand’s site. Vibe Radar does not handle payments.
Is it cheaper to build or buy HuntStand?
Adjust the numbers: hours to build, your hourly rate, running costs and the subscription price.
Over 24 months, subscribing is cheaper.
Starting hours estimated from the analysis (a weekend). Does not price what you give up (support, integrations, security).
Can I rebuild HuntStand?
Not really. HuntStand’s value is not the code: The moat is licensed nationwide parcel and ownership data plus live map sharing across a hunting party. See the honest breakdown above.
How much does HuntStand cost?
HuntStand costs about $2.92/mo (HuntStand Pro, checked 10/20/2026), which is $35.04 per year.
What do I lose by replacing HuntStand?
Honestly: Nationwide parcel boundaries and landowner names, which are licensed data you cannot regenerate; Fresh leaf-off aerial imagery and multi-source topo layers across the whole country; Live sharing with a hunting party: shared markers, check-ins, and who is sitting where right now; Native app polish offline: reliable background GPS tracks, tile prefetch, battery behavior; Weather radar, rut and deer movement forecasts, and the constant map data refreshes. If any of those are load-bearing for you, keep paying.
Is there an open-source alternative to HuntStand?
No mature open-source alternative worth pointing at, which is exactly why the one-shot prompt on this page exists.