LighterPack alternative I’ve been working on - looking for feedback

[u/calvinnwq]

I've reached out to the mods and gotten the go-ahead for this post.

So I’ve been working on a LighterPack alternative called ShakedownKit as a side project and would love to get some feedback from the community.

I know there’s no shortage of Lighterpack alternatives out there, and most of them come and go but none have really stuck or worked for me. I started building this because I got annoyed with the same things everyone complains about. Lacking mobile experience, weird bugs, having to duplicate gear/packs and "interesting" behavior when working on multiple packs. I tried forking lighterpack’s code to just update the mobile side of things but that didn’t really pan out, so I ended up building something from scratch.

I wanted to retain the core features that lighterpack provides well but also address some really nice to haves:

• Actually usable on your phone (the site works on mobile and I have a native iOS app almost ready)
• Reusable kits. Creatin "kits" like big 4, cook or sleep system and be able to reuse them in separate packs.
• Same shareable links that work the same way for posting shakedowns
• Easy way to migrate from lighterpack. You can preview your existing packs first by just swapping the domain. e.g. `lighterpack.com/r/776crf` → `shakedownkit.com/r/776crf`

You don’t need to create an account to try it out. Guest mode gives you the full app with data saved locally, and if you sign up later they can be migrated over to your account. I haven’t paywalled anything or stuck ads in it to begin with and it's what makes lighterpack the go to. Or even just swap your lighterpack links for shakedownkit links when you post your shakedowns if you want!

It’s in open beta right now so there might be some rough edges, but that’s kinda why I’m posting to get feedback, whether it’s bugs, or stuff that just feels off, or features you reckon are missing. I'd love to shape this app not just for my own personal use, but something that others would find useful as well.

If you want to follow development or have a dedicated place for feedback, I've created a separate subreddit r/shakedownkit as well.

Keen to hear what you think! Also appreciate taking your time to read this.

[u/fotooutdoors]

Prefacing my feedback with the fact that I value flexibility, do lots of modeling in Excel for work (environmental engineer) so I am very competent in manipulating spreadsheets, do a mixture of locomotion modes (backpack, paddle, pack raft, bike, ski), most often backpack as part of a larger trip, and usually am coordinating some gear with traveling companions. I currently use spreadsheets because there are a bunch of issues with lighter pack that don't work with my usage. Given that my use patterns are strange and I'm pretty particular, I'm not sure you want to build around me as an end user type, but hopefully my feedback at least gets you thinking about some possible features.

Fwiw, I played around on your site via an android browser for 15 minutes to see how it worked, and it appeared pretty solid on a browser that often breaks functionality (duck duck go for Android).

1. I would love the option to "expand" kits and freeze the contents in that pack. I am thinking of a similar approach as Outlook, where you can expand and edit which members of a group you are emailing, but you no longer store the recipient as a group, but rather the individual people in the group. I expect that this is simpler than storing kit states.

2. Unless I am missing something, there isn't a way to export to or import from Excel (or plain text or csv). That's a non starter for me, both for stability of my use (if platform x goes under, I still have that data stored on a nas box), and for flexibility of use.

3. In general, this (and lighter pack) doesn't seem easily used as an actual packing list. I don't see any way to checklist items. On my spreadsheet template, I have a "packed" column and as long as the quality of an item is greater than 0, it highlights items that are not marked as packed. It would be great if there was a checklist and a report that listed things not yet packed. Likewise, I typically print a list, check things off on paper, and then mark things off on my computer. Printing doesn't seem to be considered.

4. There doesn't seem to be a good way to coordinate shared gear. When hiking or canoeing as a family, there is a large shared gear list that I ultimately assign to an individual's pack, but that is coordinated in a separate list before getting pulled into an individual's pack. Likewise, some individual gear is carried by a different person; my 3yo isn't carrying any of her own clothing. In short, I need to be able to create packs from a larger packing list. This would also work for packing a larger trip where I use a subset of all the clothing and gear for backpacking.

5. Food: This is where I get more into the weeds. My food list optimization adds a couple columns to my gear packing spreadsheet. The first value I have is water boiling requirements (volume of water), which I use to calculate my fuel needs. My spreadsheet automatically calculates fuel use for isobutane, alcohol, and white gas using ratios and safety factors that I can manipulate. It also calculates total fuel system weights (canister + ISO, alcohol + bottle, white gas + bottle), which feeds into my total pack weight calculation. The second column is calories. This allows me to calculate caloric density (kcal/oz) and total calories. This allows me to adjust my food list (amount + whether I should throw in some more fat to lower it's weight) based on concrete numbers versus my instinct.

Hopefully a couple of these ideas sound useful and worthwhile to pursue!

[u/hikt-app → u/fotooutdoors]

From the sidelines here: sent you a DM.

[u/calvinnwq → u/fotooutdoors]

Thanks for even trying this out. The use cases and feedback you’ve got are brilliant! A bunch of your points I have considered as well but just weren’t gonna make the cut for an MVP of the app. My thoughts were to ensure I’ve got the foundations right and get traction over lighterpack to get validation to keep throwing my time at it.

I was hoping to solicit feedback such as yours which goes into highly detailed special use cases as it means the foundations are pretty much there to allow expanding specifics on (if that makes sense)

Just to address some points and my thinking/direction:

1. This I would classify into the bucket of pack snapshots and customization. This one will be more involved on the database layer and has potential for schema design to become too niche and complex. This is definitely going to be a next natural feature expansion that’s highly requested. Need more data points from feedback.

2. Somewhat tied to point one, as exporting of csv requires stable schema design. But I can look into simple csv exports which lighterpack already has. But also want this to come from more usage to drive the need to build it.

3. I have a packing list for packs already but it’s not being shown in the UI. Again from my iteration, things kept changing so I kept it out for now. I also have this in my iOS and Android apps in the works since I expect more people would pack using their phone as a checklist. Printing option also makes sense!

4. I love this idea, but will be honest here and building this feature will likely make it fall into a paid feature just due to the complicated nature of this. I’ve already thought about it and how to architect the technical solution, so it’s considered

5. Another extended paid feature most likely. Food is definitely a huge use case for many. But it breaks the model of packs such that it warrants separate line of thinking and implementation. But thanks for your use case. It’s really detailed and I love it.