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Ask HN: Emergency preparedness kit subscription service

7 points by edgefield0 ↗ HN
Building and maintaining a proper emergency preparedness kit is difficult. First, you need to know what items, food, and water to purchase based on your household. Second, everything expires at different times requiring you to continually replace certain items and food. Third, if you look to purchase everything at once, up front, you'll face sticker shock.

How about an emergency preparedness subscription service that allows you to pick a level of preparedness, input your household composition, and then allows you to build and maintain an emergency kit over time?

I'd appreciate any feedback on this idea. Thank you!

2 comments

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JoelMcCracken
I'd pay for it, if it was reasonably priced. I built a pair of these, one for myself, and one for my wife, and it was really a bit of a pain. I still don't really feel happy about the kits (do i have exaclty waht I want? Are the first aid kits good enough? etc)

One thing that would be nice is to have a whole suite of code around it. Some ideas:

- email me when 6 mos, 3 mos etc before my food/meds expire

- make products, etc customizable. For example, allow me to pick if I want a filter straw, or a water boiling kit, etc.

- group needs and resources by different types of situations. So I know that I am covered in a hurricane, but maybe not in an earthquake. I dunno.

Oh, and you can do a preparedness blog as marketing

gshdg
Absolutely agreed on this. I’m not much into subscription boxes, but this one sounds legitimately useful - particularly because keeping emergency kits up to date is one of their biggest pain points.

I would suggest it should just include refills of semi-perishables that are nearing their expiration date (with a reminder to consume the old ones) rather than an email reminder.

> - group needs and resources by different types of situations. So I know that I am covered in a hurricane, but maybe not in an earthquake. I dunno.

This is a good point. For instance, I’m very unlikely to experience flooding or lose power due to even the worst storm, but a significant earthquake where I live - rare but possible - would be absolutely devastating. As in, lucky to be alive at all after the first big tremor.

Additionally, what one has room to store and the challenges one would face in the case of a generic disaster probably differ somewhat between Manhattan vs the suburbs of Dallas.