Y
YAMAP
👤 Yoshihiko Haruyama (Doshisha law grad, dropped out of wildlife biology in Alaska, then edited a nature magazine. He knew mountains before apps.)🌐 site
Free offline maps, then about $3 a month. Half of its monthly hikers pay. Cheaper rivals still lost.
Will it work? · our read
Renewal is 90%. Ninety percent of annual subscribers renew, at a price a rival undercuts. The renewal holds every year, not just once. But it is one country, one hobby, and still in the red.
01How the money moves
Free app: your dot moves on a downloaded map, no signal needed
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800K monthly actives post 700K activity logs; the community pulls them back
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Safety features go Premium: about $38 a year, renewed by 90%
02The numbers
¥1.974B (about $13M)StatedFY24 revenue, year to June
2024-06source:
1,974,000,000 yen, year to June 2024
YAMAP's own April 2025 figures, from its June 2026 partner guide. The same deck frames 5.5M downloads as "about 60% of Japan's 8.6M hikers" — but downloads are not people, and 800K MAU is nearer 9% of that base. [our read] YAMAP partner guide (Jun 2026)
Up 26.3% on FY23. Net loss ¥419M (about $2.8M) — deliberate: they were founding an insurer.
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You have the verdict. Members get the work behind it.
- The CENTS scorecard — where it's strong, where it's soft
- The founder's key move, and the counter-move
- How it could die — the evidence, and how sure we are
- The case against our own call
- A 🚀 launchpad prompt — the case, as a plan for your business
We rate our own confidence — and argue against ourselves. Nobody else in this category does.
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YAMAP note — the CEO on the 10th and 11th term results (5 Nov 2024): revenue 1,974,000,000 yen for the year to June 2024, up 26.3%; net loss 418,900,000 yen; 4.6M downloads at Sept 2024; 27 prefectures linked for rescue; 56% of Gunma's 2022 hiking plans filed via YAMAP.YAMAP BUSINESS partner guides (PDFs dated 22 Jun 2026): 800,000 app MAU, 90% retention, 700,000 activity logs a month, 50+ municipalities (all as of April 2025); passed 5.5M downloads in Feb 2026.YAMAP Premium pricing: 5,700 yen a year (475 yen a month) or 780 yen a month; one month free; free for students; "1 in 2" of users who log a hike monthly are on Premium (YAMAP survey, March 2025).YAMAP — founder profile: Yoshihiko Haruyama, born 1980 in Kasuga, Fukuoka; Doshisha University law; left University of Alaska Fairbanks wildlife biology in 2007; worked on the magazine Kaze no Tabibito; launched YAMAP March 2013; national park partnership with the Ministry of the Environment, 2017.Wikipedia (Japanese) — YAMAP Inc.: unlisted, 97 staff, June year-end, capital 100M yen, insurance subsidiary; cites the same note post for the revenue figure.
Revenue is STATED, not FILED: YAMAP is unlisted (Wikipedia: hijoujou), and the figure comes from the CEO's own note post, not an audited P&L. The company does publish a statutory kessan koukoku, but that notice is a balance sheet and carries no revenue line — the revenue and the chart around it are the post's own. Caveats, in order of how much they should bother you: (1) The post prints the number in Japanese oku/man units (19-oku 7,400-man yen), so an ASCII search for "1.974B" will miss it; the digits 19, 7400 and 26.3 are all present in the served HTML and I confirmed them by fetching the raw bytes. (2) The "about $13M" is my arithmetic at about 150 yen per dollar (the FY average); YAMAP never said a dollar figure. Same for every other dollar on this card. (3) The figure is two years old. I listed all 96 posts on YAMAP's note account: there is no 12th- or 13th-term post, so this is the latest revenue the company has published as of July 2026. (4) The post contradicts itself once — it gives FY11's prior-year profit as +37.49M yen while giving FY10's profit as -443.93M yen. I used only the FY10 and FY11 figures, which Wikipedia corroborates from the same source. (5) The metrics are YAMAP's own April 2025 numbers in a June 2026 sales deck, and the deck is internally inconsistent on downloads: the headline says 5.6M "as of April 2025" while its own footnote says it passed 5.5M in February 2026. I used neither as a headline and took MAU instead. (6) The 90% is printed as "app retention rate"; YAMAP's B2B web page glosses the same 90% as Premium annual members' next-year renewal, which is the reading I used. That page is a Nuxt SPA, so its numbers exist only after JavaScript runs — I read it in a real browser with the URL confirmed in-page, not from raw bytes. (7) AllTrails' pricing page returned 403 to me, so I print no price for it; its bar and anchor are my read from its homepage, which lists only US cities and parks. Verified true on the strength of first-party revenue. We never score you.