The First 72 Browser tool · $9 once

Water · Heat · Light · Info

Stop planning for a family that isn’t yours.

Get your household’s exact 72-hour numbers in two minutes, then let the tool tell you what to eat before it expires. The First 72 turns four facts about your home into real quantities, a shopping list you can use today, and a card for the inside of your cupboard door.

Get The First 72 · $9
  • Runs in your browser
  • No account
  • Nothing sent to a server
  • Metric or imperial

Demo video slot

Ninety seconds of screen capture: four fields typed, the numbers appearing, the wall card printing, the tracker naming this month’s eat-down list. See the HTML comment directly above this block for the shot list and the embed snippets.

That’s the whole product. Four fields, your real numbers, a list you can shop from in the next hour.

77%
of US adults expect a disaster to reach them FEMA, 2023 survey
37%
have made a plan FEMA, 2023 survey
89%
have already read or heard how to prepare FEMA, 2023 survey

Call that denial if you want, but the numbers say otherwise. Nearly nine in ten adults have the information already. They believe the risk. The cupboard is still empty.

Here is what actually happens, and it is smaller and more boring than fear.

You open a checklist. Four lines in it says store water, and you think: how much? For four people? For how many days? Do the kids count the same as the adults? What about the dog, and what about August, when it hits a hundred degrees here and a gallon a day stops being a reasonable guess?

The checklist has no answer, because it was written for an average household and yours is not average. So you close the tab and promise yourself the weekend.

You have been promising yourself that weekend for three years, and your motivation was never the problem. Nobody did the arithmetic for you, and you were never going to do long division about tap water on a Tuesday night.

When the power goes out, people picture a hundred problems. There are four.

  • Water 01

    It stops being safe, or it stops arriving. Sanitation is the half people forget to count, which is how a household ends up with plenty to drink and a serious problem by the second morning.

  • Heat 02

    It stops being something you control, which is a problem in July for the same reason it is a problem in January. It is also why the food in your kitchen turns into a clock the moment the fridge dies.

  • Light 03

    It goes, and with it everything you can do after five in the afternoon. Most of the second-day mistakes people make are really just decisions taken in the dark.

  • Info 04

    You stop knowing what is happening, how long it lasts, or whether the right move is to stay or to leave. Nobody packs for this one, and it is the pillar that makes the other three worse.

Every other problem in the first seventy-two hours is one of those four wearing a costume. Cooking is heat. Charging a phone is information. Keeping insulin cold is heat. Sanitation is water.

You don’t need a bunker and you don’t need two hundred items. You need four columns, a number in each, and none of them touching zero for three days.

That is the whole job. Hand somebody the four numbers and they finish it in an afternoon.

What you get

One purchase. Three things, and one of them keeps working.

01

The Readiness Calculator

Four facts. How many people live in your house, how many days you want covered, what your climate does, and which pillars you want tracked in detail.

It returns quantities. Not categories, not ranges, not “consider storing”. The amount, for your household, rated to your people and your climate instead of to a national average. Gallons or litres, because it runs in metric and imperial and you pick the one you actually think in.

  • Shopping list Carry it to the store or paste it into a delivery order.
  • One-page PDF Your plan, your numbers, ready to print.
  • Wall card For the inside of a cupboard door.

The wall card is the one that saves you. A plan living on your phone assumes you are home, awake, and holding a charged phone, which is a lot to assume about the exact situation it was written for. Paper on a door works when you are at the office and your partner is the one standing in the kitchen.

02

The Rotation Tracker

This is the part nobody else builds, and it is the part that fails for almost everyone who tries.

Everything you store expires. People buy the water and the cans and the batteries, feel good for three weeks, then let the shelf sit for four years until somebody checks the dates and bins the lot. Buying the supplies is the easy half. Remembering them is where it collapses.

So the tracker holds your dates and does the remembering. Every month it names what to eat before it turns and what to buy to replace it. You stop maintaining a stockpile and start eating your own groceries in a smarter order, and the shelf stays current without costing you a single afternoon ever again.

That is also why this is a tool instead of a document. A document is finished the day it downloads. This one earns its place in month seven.

03

The guide, four 72-hour plans, and the wall card

The guide takes each pillar and shows how it actually fails, which is rarely the way people imagine.

Then four plans, staged across the full seventy-two hours. They open at the first ten minutes and carry through to day three, with a checkpoint at the first hour, the sixth, the twelfth, and each morning after. One for living alone. One for a couple. One for a family with kids. And the Extra Care Plan, for a house where somebody cannot manage alone and that has to be worked out in advance instead of improvised around at two in the morning.

The first ten minutes get their own section in every one of them, because most of what goes wrong on day two was either prevented or caused before you finished looking for the flashlight.

Privacy

Nothing you type leaves your computer.

The calculator runs in your browser. No account, no email, no server receiving anything, no database holding your household.

That isn’t a privacy policy. It is the architecture. Open your browser’s network tab while you use it and watch nothing happen. It takes ten seconds and I would rather you checked.

  • Every calculation happens client-side, with zero network calls after the page loads.
  • Your dates and quantities stay in your own browser storage, on your own machine.
  • No analytics tracking what you entered, no third-party pixels, no cookie banner because there is nothing to consent to.
  • It keeps working with the connection off.

This matters because of what the tool needs to know. How many people live in your house, how old they are, what has to stay cold, roughly where you are. That is a profile of your family, and you should not be handing it to a stranger’s server to get a shopping list back. Here you don’t.

Who this is not for

If you already run a rotation system you stick to, and your partner could execute your plan without you in the room, skip this. You did the work and I have nothing to sell you.

If you want off-grid living or food storage measured in years, this is the wrong product. Three days, on purpose, and the narrowness is the feature.

And if you came to be told the world is ending, you will hate this. It reads closer to a tax return than a warning, and that is deliberate.

“I could just ask ChatGPT”

You could. Ask it and it will hand you a competent list in forty seconds.

Then watch what happens next.

It will not hold your expiry dates. It will not tell you in March that the chili from last October needs eating this week. That only works if something keeps the record between sessions, and keeping the record is most of what you are buying.

You also have to feed it the whole profile first. Household size, ages, medical details, location. That is a strange thing to type into somebody else’s server for a product about not depending on anyone, and it is the one part of this that a chat window structurally cannot fix.

The rest is simple. Nine dollars costs less than the afternoon you would spend working it out, and far less than the fourth year of promising yourself the weekend.

$9

One payment. Nothing after it.

  • The Readiness Calculator, with metric and imperial output
  • The Rotation Tracker, holding your dates month after month
  • The Four Pillars guide
  • Four staged 72-hour plans: solo, couple, family, and extra care
  • The printable wall card
  • Unlimited re-runs when your household changes
Get The First 72 · $9

No subscription. No account. No second page asking for more money.

What I promise, and what I don’t

Use it, print your plan, and if it did not hand you something you could act on, ask for your money back and I will send it.

Now the limits, stated plainly, because this is a category full of people promising things they cannot deliver.

This is a plan and a set of numbers. It is not safety. It is not a promise about how any particular event will go for you. It is not medical advice, and it never will be. If somebody in your household has medical needs, the plans will tell you to take it to the person who prescribes for them, because that is the only correct answer and I am not going to pretend to be qualified to give you another one.

Questions

How long does the calculator take?
Two minutes for the numbers, one more to print. Buying the things is the long part, and that is a trip to the store rather than a project.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes. You will want a printer eventually, because the wall card is meant for paper, but the calculator itself is fine on a phone.
Metric or imperial?
Both. You pick, and you can switch whenever you like.
Do I need to be online?
Only to load it the first time. After that it runs locally, and it keeps working with the connection off.
Is there a subscription?
No.
Where do the starting quantities come from?
The published US federal guidance, which is one gallon of water per person per day for at least three days. Every figure I start from is sourced at the bottom of this page so you can check it yourself. The calculator then adjusts for your household size, your chosen window and your climate, and you can override any of it.
Will this work outside the United States?
The arithmetic is not country-specific and the units switch. The published quantities I start from come from US federal sources, and those are cited below, so check whether your own country’s guidance differs before you treat the defaults as final.
What if my household changes?
Run it again. Two minutes, no limit, and it is yours.

Two minutes from now you can have the number.

The actual amount of water, food, light and backup your house needs to carry three days without anything reaching zero. Printed, on the cupboard door, done.

Get The First 72 · $9
The First 72
Your numbers in two minutes
$9