Nobody pays to be in this guide. No advertising, no sponsored listings, no paid placement, and no way for a business to buy its way in, up, or out. You pay for it once, so it works for you rather than for whoever bought the top of the page.
Every free guide to this valley is paid for by the businesses in it. That is not a scandal, it is just what free costs, and it is worth knowing which kind of thing you are reading.
What is actually open
A resort town empties twice a year. Places close for a month, or for three, and the listing online goes on saying open because nobody went back to change it. Google's own tool for marking special hours covers at most six days in a row, which is not the shape of a shoulder season.
So every fact in the guide carries a source and a date, and the app tells you which one you are looking at:
- Checked in person, 12 October
- Owner updated, 3 June
- Hours unknown, call ahead
A confident wrong answer is worse than an admitted gap.
Somebody who drives across town to a locked door has been harmed by the guide. Somebody who was told to call first has not.
It works with no signal
About thirty miles of the Gallatin Canyon has no usable cell reception. That is geography rather than a gap somebody is about to close: covering the 22 miles from the river crossing up to Big Sky would take seven or eight towers.
Out there the phone is a brick. A guide already on it is not.
The whole guide and the whole map live on the device before you leave. Nothing you read waits for the network, including the map, which is why it is a bundled map rather than one that streams tiles.
Big Sky is three places
Mountain Village and Moonlight Basin sit at 7,500 feet at the foot of Lone Peak. Meadow Village and Town Center are the walkable part, holding most of the restaurants, the shops, the movie theatre, the ice rink, and the rodeo grounds. The Canyon runs along US-191. There is real driving distance and real vertical between them.
A first-time visitor does not want two hundred pins. They want to know which of the three they are standing in, and what is in the other two.
What it costs
Free to browse. $9.99 for the rest. The directory, the map, the orientation, and the wildlife safety content are free and work offline. $9.99 unlocks the depth: verified hours and season, trails with parking, itineraries, and Yellowstone.
One time, per device. No account, no subscription, no expiry, and updates are free.
That $9.99 is the entire business. It is also the reason the guide can say nobody paid to be in it.
What it is not
It is an independent guide. Not affiliated with Big Sky Resort, with the Chamber, or with any business it lists.
Where the people who make the guide have an interest in something in it, the entry says so in plain language. It gets no better placement for that, and nothing it competes with gets buried.
Where it stands
The app is being built. It is not on the App Store yet, and there is nothing here to sign up for. It ships when it is good enough to be worth $9.99 in a place where being wrong costs somebody their afternoon.