Where the money goes
OurHike takes no donations today, and it will never take one on a trail organization's behalf. Money you give the trail belongs with the organizations who maintain it, and it should reach them without passing through us — so it doesn't. That is a decision, not an oversight and not a stage we are waiting out. Two commitments hold either way:
Nothing safety-relevant is ever behind a paywall.
Water, closures, hazards, and the map itself stay free for everyone, always. If paid tiers ever exist they cover convenience, never safety — staying safe on the trail must not require a subscription. That is the point of the project, not a promotion.
The trail needs money today — give it directly.
The Appalachian Trail Conservancy, clubs like the New York–New Jersey Trail Conference, and preserves like Mohonk Preserve maintain the ground this app describes, and take donations now, on their own sites — they deserve them. NY State Parks and NYS DEC maintain trails here too, funded through the state rather than a donation page. We are not affiliated with any of them — we just think your money belongs with the people holding the tools.
If OurHike ever charges
It would be for its own convenience features and nothing else: optional passes for long-distance use — a thru-hike pass, regional passes, an all-access ceiling — and a volunteer exemption so the people doing trail work never pay for the map of the trail they maintain. What those passes would not do is send money to the trail organizations. They would cover OurHike's own costs. The organizations are supported the way this page already says: you give to them directly, on their own sites, and nothing you give them touches us.
None of it is live, no dates are promised, and if it ever does arrive it will be on this page with the accounting alongside it. Payments would only ever happen here on the web, never inside the app, so app-store fees never take a cut of what OurHike charges for itself. They could never have taken a cut of trail money either way — that money does not pass through us to be cut.
Running costs today are small and covered by the volunteers building it: the map data is served from commodity storage, the site is static hosting, and the design goal is that it stays cheap enough to be inherited (value #7).
Other ways to help
Report what you find on the trail from inside the app — a dry spring, a blowdown, a washed-out crossing reaches a moderator who can act on it. Or help build the thing itself: the whole project is open source, and the issue tracker is where the work is.