A Munro in winter, a coastal path with thick fog rolling in, a Lake District ridge when the rain turns sleet. Vygard Hike doesn't replace map-and-compass or proper kit — it's the layer that catches a missed check-in when nobody at home would know to worry yet.
Pick the line on Ordnance Survey 1:25,000. We compute expected duration, sunset time, and forecast on your line — not just the trailhead.
One tap shares the planned route + expected return time to whoever's at home. They get a 'started, finished safely' bookend with no chat between.
If you don't tap 'down safe' by your expected return + 2 hours, your contact gets pinged. If they can't reach you, it escalates to Mountain Rescue with route + last known location.
No clever onboarding to dig through, no settings menu to find. Open the app, see one big button. Tap it. Get on with the walk. The whole UI is built around “your hands are on the compass, not the phone”.
Plot in advance, share the line with home, see your expected sunset point. Works offline once cached.
Conditions on your actual line, not just the postcode. Wind gusts on the summit, fog forecast for the bealach, lightning watch.
When you press SOS, your what3words address is included so Mountain Rescue + Police can find you to ±3m, even in 100m visibility.
We know battery-dead at +6 hours is different from someone in trouble at +6 hours. We use heart-rate from the watch + last movement to disambiguate.
Most hill falls happen on the descent. Vygard's fall detector is retuned for the higher-impact, longer-airborne profile of a scree slip.
Leave the phone in the car. Apple Watch Ultra with cellular pairs with Mountain Rescue 999 over its own data connection.
Phone with offline OS Maps + a watch on your wrist is the standard kit. The Apple Watch Ultra changes the game in patchy-signal terrain — its cellular works in places your phone won't. For genuine off-grid (deep Highlands, Cairngorm plateau in winter) pair with a Garmin inReach for satellite SOS.
BYOD — no proprietary hardware. Install free from the App Store / Play Store. Route history stays on your device and your Vygard tenant. Cellular Watch billing is between you and your network operator.
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 FAQUK hill rescue stats are clear — the single biggest factor in a successful rescue is somebody at home knowing the route. Most walkers know that and write a note. Most also forget to update the note when they extend the route. Vygard Hike is the always-correct version of that note, with weather wired in and Mountain Rescue able to find you to 3 metres.
Vygard Hike is not a substitute for a map, compass, navigation training, appropriate kit, or the judgement to turn back. It's the layer that catches a missed return when the home contact wouldn't otherwise know to worry yet. Cellular coverage in mountainous areas is patchy — we queue SOS events when signal returns, but a queued SOS reaching dispatch 40 minutes after the trigger isn't a substitute for the worker being able to walk back to coverage themselves.
We'll email when Vygard Hike ships (Available now). No spam, one email, you're first in line.