What is OpenHunt?
An open source hunting map platform built on open government data — free to use, free to self-host.
OpenHunt is an open source hunting map platform: the layers hunters pay $35–$100 a year for — land ownership, hunt units, terrain, legal motorized routes — built entirely from open government data and open source mapping tech.
Nearly everything commercial hunting apps sell is repackaged public data. Public land boundaries come from USGS PAD-US. Parcel ownership comes from county assessors. Hunt units come from state wildlife agencies. Slope and aspect come from USGS elevation models. OpenHunt ingests those primary sources directly, tiles them, and serves them as static files.
The map is free, forever. Every layer, every covered state. Paid plans on the hosted service sell convenience — cross-device sync, offline packs, alerts — never the data. Self-hosters get all of it, ungated.
Where to start
Use the map
Layers, access verdicts, waypoints, routes, and GPX — in the browser, no account required.
Self-host the stack
One compose file brings up the API, Postgres, and the web app on your own hardware.
Run the pipeline
Turn government GIS downloads into PMTiles. Adding a state is a registry entry, not new code.
API & sync
A deliberately small REST API: sessions, offline-first sync, and sharing.
What's live today
Twelve states — Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Arizona, California, Pennsylvania, Utah, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington — with the layer set: PAD-US public lands, private parcels with owner names, computed landlocked public land, hunt units (GMUs, elk hunt areas, deer zones, hunting districts, WMUs), walk-in access programs, slope angle and aspect, hillshade and 3D terrain, trails, and MVUM motorized routes.
Coverage is not uniform, and the gaps are stated rather than hidden — see state coverage for what each state carries and where its data stops. Parcel owner names depend on what each state's assessors actually release — in Pennsylvania no open statewide fabric with owners exists, so parcels there are boundaries plus the handful of counties that grant reuse. Walk-in layers exist only where the agency publishes one; Pennsylvania's Hunter Access Program is published but licensed against reuse, so it is absent rather than scraped. Draw odds exist only where the agency publishes the underlying statistics, which Pennsylvania does not do at all.
The web app covers the whole product; the mobile app (Android, offline-first) adds GPS, background track recording, and offline packs on top. See the mobile app.
Principles
- The map is free, forever. No paywalled data, no teaser layers.
- Open data in, open data out. Published tiles and processed layers are freely downloadable, so anyone can self-host the whole stack.
- Original sources only. Government and open data ingested directly — never scraped from proprietary products.
- Cheap to run. Static PMTiles on zero-egress object storage; there is no tile server, so a free map stays affordable to operate.
- Offline-first. The apps stay fully useful with zero connectivity — that's the whole point of a hunting map.
License
Code is AGPL-3.0 — if you run a modified hosted version, you share your changes. Published data artifacts carry the licenses of their sources; see data sources & licensing.