Crashes on a bike are different — high-speed impact, possible unconsciousness, often miles from anyone. Vygard Cycling watches the accelerometer 50 times a second and knows what a real crash looks like. If you don't dismiss it within 60 seconds, your nominated contact gets a live pin + SOS.
Tap Start Ride. We track GPS, speed, accelerometer + gyro at 50 Hz. Battery drain about 8% per hour — equivalent to running Komoot.
Sudden deceleration + impact + stillness fires the alert. A loud + haptic 60-second countdown asks if you're OK. Tap green if it was a kerb hop or a stop.
If you don't cancel, your one chosen contact gets your live GPS pin + SOS. They can call you, screenshot the pin for the emergency services, or drive to you directly.
No clever onboarding to dig through, no settings menu to find. Open the app, see one big button. Tap it. Get on with the ride. The whole UI is built around “your hands are on the bars, not the phone”.
Real crash signatures vs kerb hops, hard braking and clipless drops — none of which should fire SOS.
One chosen contact only — partner, parent, riding buddy. Auto-ends 10 minutes after you stop moving.
If the bike moves while you're in the cafe (phone-on-handlebar mount goes away from your wrist watch), we alert you instantly.
Crash alert on the wrist too. Triple-tap the crown to fire SOS silently if you're being followed or feel unsafe stopped.
Pre-ride: wind direction, rain timing, sunset. Bigger deal for a 4-hour solo Sportive than a 10-mile commute, but useful for both.
If your chosen contact doesn't acknowledge within 5 minutes, the cascade auto-escalates to 999 with the same pin.
Vygard Cycling runs on the phone in your handlebar mount, the watch on your wrist, or both together. We don't sell hardware — we just unlock more features when you've already got the right kit.
No hardware lock-in — install from the App Store or Play Store with your email + the wizard link, uninstall on offboarding. Worker data + ride history wipe with the uninstall.
Every Vygard Personal app is designed so the vast majority of alerts cost us nothing to send. SMS and WhatsApp — which we'd otherwise burn at 3-5p per message — kick in only as an emergency fallback. That's why the apps stay at £4.99/mo.
If your contact has any Vygard app installed, they get a push notification with the alert + a tap-to-call button. Instant, no SMS cost.
If they don't have a Vygard app, your phone's own Messages app opens with a pre-filled SOS text + a one-tap install link. iMessage and RCS deliver it for free.
If your contact can't be reached any other way — or it's a genuine unconscious SOS where you can't tap — Vygard sends an SMS via Twilio. Counted against your monthly allowance.
Parallel path to SMS for contacts who use WhatsApp as their primary messenger. Same counting, same allowance pot.
Sized for ~5 SOS events per month at 4 messages each. Most users never get close to the cap. If your allowance runs out mid-month, the app falls back to opening your phone's Messages composer instead of blocking the alert — your safety is never gated on a billing limit.
Top-ups are monthly add-ons in your account settings — cancel anytime, no contract.
Per-user SMS cost is the biggest variable expense in any consumer safety app. If we shipped "unlimited SMS" on a £4.99 sub, we'd have to choose between losing money on heavy users or making the cap dishonest. By being explicit upfront — push-first, native handoff, then metered SMS — we keep the sub price low for everyone, and the people who do need more (frequent travellers, large family groups) pay a fair top-up.
Full breakdown in the FAQMost cycling-safety apps were built for racing telemetry. The 'safety' feature was an afterthought added in v2. Vygard Cycling is the opposite — we started with 'crash on a B-road at 04:00 on a 6am audax start', built outwards from there. If you're racing and want power meter graphs, you've already got an app for that. If you want someone to know you crashed, you don't.
Crash detection catches the majority of high-impact crashes but not all of them — slow-speed clipless tip-overs onto soft grass, light-touch encounters with a car door, falls into deep water all sit outside the trained envelope. The 60-second cancel window also means the system is slower than a human pressing SOS — if you can press the button, do. Vygard Cycling is a fallback for when you can't.
We'll email when Vygard Cycling ships (Available now). No spam, one email, you're first in line.