Exploration Guides

“Pay” for apps

All park apps are currently free to download, free to use, and without any limitations. There are ads on the apps, and ads on the web page, too, but it takes a lot of time and money to go to parks, usually many times, buy GPS equipment to survey the parks, cameras to photograph them, pay web hosting, set up web pages….

Of course, no one wants to pay for an app until they’ve used it. No one wants to pay for an app they only use once or twice, either. And, especially in this economy, a lot of us can’t afford to pay much, anyway.

A different method was needed to pay for these apps.

Following the lead of “pay what you want” restaurants, these apps are being provided as “pay what you want” apps. Of course, you already have the apps, so it’s really more of a “pay what you want for future apps.”

So how much? Compare these apps to printed trail guides. A basic trail guide for a few small/medium parks will run between $10 and $20. A single, large park will run $20 to $30 for a trail guide. Those trail guides don’t have as much detail in the maps, don’t update, and don’t provide the interactive or GPS features.

Rather than think of paying for one app, however, feel free to consider how much you use all of them. Do you use one app fifty times? Fifty apps one time each?

Payments are processed entirely on the secure Paypal site (or the equally secure Google site, soon).  Your payment will help fund our future work, and allow us to continue to produce more apps, on more systems, for more parks, in the future.