A climbing journal that works wherever you climb.
Chalky keeps everything on your phone, so you can log a climb anywhere, including the places with no signal at all.
Hi, I'm Bryce
I started climbing in 2024. Most weeks I’m at Flow on the Sunshine Coast, bouldering, and I get out to Mt Ngungun when I can.
I built Chalky because every app I tried let me down the same way. Some were paywalled. Most of them wanted signal, and there’s no signal at the places I climb outdoors. So I made my own, with one rule: everything lives on your phone and the cloud is only a backup.
It’s just me building it, around a full-time job as a developer. I use Chalky for my own climbing, so the things that annoy you probably annoy me too.
That’s about it. I hope you get something out of it.
— Bryce · Made in Australia 🇦🇺
The gap Chalky fills
Most climbing apps solve part of this. theCrag, Mountain Project and 8a.nu are great references, but they only cover crags someone has already mapped, and they’re public by default. Gym apps like KAYA and Sloper do a lot for you when your gym is in their network, and less when you’re outside it. Crimpd and Lattice are built for hangboards and periodisation rather than journaling. Day One and Notion don’t know what a grade is.
None of them are wrong. They just assume someone has already mapped where you climb. A lot of my climbing happens in a shed with a woodie in it, or two hours down a dirt road, and there was nowhere to put those sessions. So I built somewhere.
What I believe
Yours by default
Your sessions, routes and reflections belong to you. Profiles are private, logs are private, and nothing about you is public unless you explicitly opt in.
Offline is how, not what
Chalky works at the crag, in basements, on planes and in countries with patchy data. The local SQLite database is the source of truth; the cloud is a backup.
No lock-in
No partnerships that decide which gyms count. No central route database that decides which crags exist. Type a venue name and start logging.
Portable forever
Import from theCrag CSV. Export everything as JSON, anytime. If Chalky ever shuts down, you take your years of logs with you.
What Chalky won't do
Saying no is part of the product. Some of these will tempt me forever; I've decided up front that they conflict with what Chalky is for.
- Public global feeds or grade leaderboards.
- A centralised crag/route database that competes with theCrag or Mountain Project.
- Gym partnerships that gate features behind specific venues.
- Selling your data, advertising or third-party tracking. Ever.
- Heatmaps or aggregate location data for outdoor crags. Access ethics matter.
I do use anonymous product analytics, hosted in the EU and never linked to you, so I can see which features help and where people get stuck. It's on by default and you can switch it off anytime in Settings → Privacy.
Climb wherever you want. Log it.
Leave your email and I'll let you know when Chalky is out.
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