Eiji Akiyama

Thermal Buddy: Hiker's Logbook - Stop guessing what to wear. Your past hikes have the answer.

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Thermal Buddy is a personal gear logbook for hikers, backpackers and trail runners. After each outing, log what you wore and slept in, the conditions, and how you felt, from Too Cold to Just Right to Too Hot. Before your next trip, search your past logs by temperature and instantly see what worked and what didn't. No account required — your logs live on your device and sync privately via iCloud. Free for up to 8 logs; the yearly plan includes a 1-month free trial.

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Eiji Akiyama
Maker
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Hi Product Hunt! I'm Eiji — a hiker, backpacker, and solo developer. Thermal Buddy is my first app, and it exists because of a cycle I could never break. I call it the freeze-regret cycle. You pack based on a vague memory of "what worked last time." You get it wrong. You spend the night too cold to sleep — or you hike drenched in sweat under one layer too many. You swear you'll remember next time. Then a year later, standing over your gear pile the night before a trip, you're guessing all over again. Freeze. Regret. Repeat. Thermal Buddy breaks that cycle. After each outing you log what you wore and slept in, the conditions, and how you felt — on a five-point scale from Too Cold to Too Hot. Before the next trip, you search your own past logs by temperature and instantly see what actually kept you comfortable and what didn't. Your memory stops being the bottleneck. A few things I'm proud of that didn't fit the short description: • Scene-based logging. What keeps you warm while moving is completely different from what keeps you warm asleep — so you log per scene (Active, Rest, Sleep, Transit) instead of one blurry summary of the whole day. • Search ranked by comfort. Set a temperature range and your best past setups rise to the top. It's a personal, field-tested database — not generic "it's 10°C, wear a jacket" advice that ignores your gear and how hot or cold you personally run. • Multi-day trips. Group related logs into a single trip — ideal for thru-hikes, hut-to-hut routes, and weekend backpacking. • Yours, and private. No account needed. Your logs live on your device and sync via iCloud. Purchases run through the App Store, and the app collects only anonymous, non-personal usage signals to help me improve it — nothing tied to you or your logs. It's free for up to 8 logs, so you can feel the "aha" of searching your own history before paying a cent. Unlimited is a yearly plan (with a 1-month free trial), or a one-time Lifetime unlock if you'd rather buy once and own it forever. I built this for myself and shipped it because other hikers kept asking for it. If you've ever lived the freeze-regret cycle, I'd genuinely love to hear how you've dealt with it — and what would make Thermal Buddy more useful for you. Happy trails, Eiji
Eiji Akiyama

You may think it is a lot of work to log all the clothes and sleeping gear every time. I don't want to do that either. So I built auto fill feature. Once the gear item is in your gear list (by adding to a log or directly to gear list), you just type a part of gear name and select from the candidates, then gear name, brand and gear category fill in automatically. So adding layers and gear into the log is far easier than you imagine.

Also in multi-day backpacking trips, you can copy the log from day before so you don't have to add all the same gear again.

You can also package multiple logs as one trip if you like. You can do it after coming back from the trip. You don't have to worry about when you are in the mountains.

Eiji Akiyama

Designed for trail, designed by a hiker, backpacker and trail runner.
You don't need any network connection for the app to work. Dark screen colours were chosen because darker screens consume less buttery and easier to see under direct sunlight and in sleeping bags.
I want to make it as easy and frictionless as possible to use it on trail. So if you experience any friction when inputing data on trail, I would love to hear your feedback!