Help keep WildFire-Ready free for everyone.
WildFire-Ready is an independent public-safety service covering Western Canada and 18 western US states — free for everyone, with no ads and no paywalls. It runs on sponsors and supporters. Your support is what keeps it live and reaching more wildfire-exposed communities.
The promise we are not breaking
Official agencies publish excellent wildfire information across Western North America. WildFire-Ready brings it together into one live map — and the consumer apps that try to do the same usually carry advertising or sit behind a subscription. We built WildFire-Ready to bring it together without putting a tollbooth in front of life-safety information.
- Free forever. No paywall, no in-app purchase, no premium tier — ever.
- No ads in the safety experience. No ad networks, and never any ads on the map, the fire data, or the alerts. Sponsors are named on the app's loading screen and the Supporters page — recognition for funding the work, not advertising.
- No data sold. Most data never leaves your device. Nothing is sold or shared.
- Official sources only. BC Wildfire Service, Alberta Wildfire, CWFIS (NRCan), Environment and Climate Change Canada, DriveBC, 511 Alberta; in the US, the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC / WFIGS) and the National Weather Service; plus NASA FIRMS satellite detections continent-wide.
- Companion to 911. Not a replacement for emergency services — always confirm with the source.
Where your support actually goes
WildFire-Ready has real running costs. We are honest about them. Here is what your support covers — every line is a real bill.
Map tiles
Mapbox tiles render every map view in the app and the web dashboard. Billed per map load — costs scale linearly with how many people open the app during a fire event.
Servers
Railway runs the API and the background worker that polls government feeds every few minutes, computes fire-weather ranks, and dispatches push notifications.
WildFire-Ready Summaries
The plain-language summary on each fire is generated through Anthropic's Claude API. Every summary is metered. We cache aggressively, but at scale this is a real line item.
Push notifications
Firebase Cloud Messaging on Android, Apple Push Notification service on iOS, with Expo as the dispatcher. Free at low volume, paid as we scale across Western North America.
App Store + Play fees
Apple Developer membership ($99 USD per year), Google Play registration, and the build infrastructure that lets us ship silent over-the-air updates without forcing a re-download.
Reliability + monitoring
Sentry for crash reports (scrubbed, no PII), uptime checks,
domain registration, and the email infrastructure that runs
team@wildfire-ready.ca.
Support via Stripe
One-time contribution, secure checkout, no recurring charges. Stripe handles the card details — WildFire-Ready never sees them. Every dollar keeps the app running and free.
- One-time — no recurring charges
- Secure Stripe-hosted checkout
- 100% goes straight into running the app
WildFire-Ready is an independent public-safety service, not a registered charity — contributions aren't tax-receipted; they go straight into keeping the app running and free.
What more funding unlocks
Past keeping the lights on, additional funding directly translates to more provinces, more languages, and more layers on the map. Nothing on this list is hypothetical — these are scoped pieces of work waiting on the budget to ship them.
- Wider coverage. WildFire-Ready already spans Western Canada and 18 western US states. The same data model extends to more regions — deeper evacuation, road-closure, and air-quality feeds per state and province — as funding lets us run the servers and integrations behind them.
- Indigenous-language localization. Wildfire risk disproportionately affects First Nations communities. Translation and review with native speakers is the right thing to do, and the right thing to fund.
- Deeper data layers. Private-sector fire-perimeter feeds, AI smoke detection, and predictive spread models — integrated, attributed, and layered onto the map.
- Hardware for evacuation reception centres. Tablets and kiosk displays so emergency social services staff can show evacuees the live map without depending on personal devices.
- Faster refresh and more redundancy. Tighter polling cadence on critical feeds, plus failover paths when an upstream goes down during a major fire event.
Other ways to help (no money required)
Supporting financially is voluntary. None of these cost a thing.
Share the app
Send the website to one person you know who lives near wildfire country: a parent, a coworker, a friend with a cabin. That is the single biggest thing you can do.
Rate & review
A short review on the App Store or Google Play helps the app surface to others searching for wildfire information. It is free and it genuinely moves the needle on visibility.
Send feedback
Spotted a bug, a wrong source, or a confusing screen? Email team@wildfire-ready.ca. Real reports from real users shape what gets fixed first.
Tell your fire department
If you sit on a local FireSmart committee, a regional fire service, or an emergency planning team, point them at /partners. Distribution to staff and volunteers is the highest-leverage move.
Refer a partner
Insurance carrier, FireSmart program, community foundation, band office? An intro to the right person inside an organization is often worth more than a cheque.
Rate the app
A quick star on the App Store or Google Play page is the single biggest free thing you can do for the project — it decides whether the next person searching "wildfire" across Western North America finds us.
Stay in touch
Email is the primary channel — the fastest way to reach a real person on the team.
Follow along
Our public channels — plus the press page, which tracks public milestones.
Who is behind this
WildFire-Ready is an independent public-safety service covering Western Canada and 18 western US states, kept free by the sponsors and supporters who believe wildfire information should be free for everyone. Read the longer version on the about page, or the partners page for how organizations can sponsor the work.
Companion to 911
WildFire-Ready is a companion to 911 and official emergency services — not a replacement. Government feeds can be delayed, incomplete, or temporarily unavailable. In an emergency, call 911 and follow the instructions of local authorities and official alerting (Alert Ready, EmergencyInfoBC, Alberta Emergency, and US state and county emergency management).