Buy me a coffee
What this costs to run, and how to chip in if you want to.
A tip, not a purchase
Giving buys nothing. There is no donor version of this site: no earlier estimates, no extra routes, no removed advertising, nothing held back from anyone who does not pay. Everything here is the same for everyone, and that is a rule about how the site is built rather than a promise about how it is meant.
It stays a rule because this site estimates whether ice has formed and says nothing about whether anything is safe to climb. A site you had bought something from would be a different thing, and this one is not going to become that.
What it costs
- Hosting — Runs the site and the twice-daily model job.
- Database — Holds the route catalogue, reports and subscriptions.
- Email — Sign-in links and the condition digests.
- The domain — ice-cycles.com.
The weather and terrain data are free: Open-Meteo, the National Weather Service, USGS 3DEP and NOAA GLERL. They are credited in the footer of every page, and the model is only as good as they are.
Worth more than money
The model is bottlenecked on observations, not on funding. A report from a route you were actually on is the scarce thing here — the model cannot be fitted against anything else, and no amount of hosting fixes that. Find a route and say what you saw.