About

Built for the people actually running lines.

American trapping resources are scattered — 2005-era forums, Facebook groups, state agency PDFs, and spreadsheets shared in DMs. UnitedTrappers pulls all of it into one modern, professional platform that respects the culture without looking like it was built in a weekend.

Principles

Honest data

Every price links to its auction source. Every regulation links to the state's official PDF. Nothing is fabricated, and records we're still verifying say so.

Zero fluff UI

The site is dark, data-dense, and fast. No hero banners, no stock photos, no animated illustrations. The aesthetic matches the work.

Free at the base

Anyone can use prices, regulations, gear, and the forum without paying. The logbook pays for the servers.

Built by a trapper

Not a pivoted startup. Feature decisions come from what's useful on the line — not from marketing decks.

Privacy-first

Session-cookie auth, no third-party ad trackers. Analytics are anonymous (Umami). We don't sell data — there's no data to sell.

Self-hosted infrastructure

Runs on a single Proxmox node: Postgres, Redis, Caddy. No SaaS dependencies means low cost, long horizon, and no outages you can't investigate.

Why this exists

Every trapper has the same workflow: check auction reports on one tab, state regulations on another, a supply-house price on a third, and log the season's catches in a notebook that's been rained on twice. The professional trappers do this with decades of institutional memory. The new ones lose a season figuring out that nothing connects.

There's no reason any of this should be fragmented. Price data, regulations, and gear are public information. Season catch data is yours. The logbook doesn't need to be a Google Sheet. It's all workable — it just takes someone willing to build it for this audience rather than pivoting something else to "also serve trappers."

The business model is simple and unchanging: prices, regulations, gear comparisons, and the community forum are free forever. The logbook is $8 a month for people who want unlimited lines, revenue tracking, and CSV export. That's it. No VC, no growth team, no AI-generated content filler. If the logbook covers the server bill, the site exists indefinitely.

Stack

A deliberately boring, conservative tech stack. No framework chasing, no "rewrite next year" — durable tools that work well together and will still be maintained in 2030.

Layer	Technology	Why
Content pages	Astro 4 + MDX	Static generation — zero JS on content, instant loads, strong SEO.
Interactive app	SvelteKit 2 (Node adapter)	Reactive UI for the logbook and dashboard without the React bundle tax.
API	Fastify 5	Fast, typed, no-nonsense Node server with solid plugin ecosystem.
Database	PostgreSQL 16	Everything relational — users, prices, regulations, traplines, sets, catches.
Cache + queue	Redis 7 + BullMQ	Price queries, session storage, scraper job queue.
Charts	Apache ECharts	Customizable, works on the darkest palettes, good with large datasets.
Maps	Leaflet + OpenStreetMap	Self-hosted topographic tiles. No Google Maps API dependency.
CSS	Hand-written	Design tokens and semantic classes. No utility-class framework.
Edge	Caddy + Let's Encrypt	Automatic TLS, HTTP/2 + HTTP/3, simple config.

Contact

Feedback, correction, regional data contribution, or regulatory update? Email admin@unitedtrappers.net. The community forum is also the right place for public discussion and regional season reports.