Yes. PeakShot is free throughout the beta season. A paid Pro tier may come later as the product grows — if and when it does, beta members will be told first, before anyone else.

That is the one thing we will never tell you — the secrecy is the game. Every supported route hides geofenced Photo Zones at its most photogenic points. You find them by walking the route: the app gives you an approach alert when you are getting close, and the zone arms only once you are standing inside it. Route pages tease how many zones a walk holds, never where they are.

Fair play. A PeakShot entry has to be captured live, inside the zone, during your shot window, using the in-app camera. Each frame is fingerprinted at the moment of capture and stamped with your GPS fix and the time. That is what makes every entry provably taken from the same spot under the same pressure — gallery uploads would break the entire promise, so they are never accepted for competition.

Every entry is graded by AI against the zone’s brief using a fixed, public rubric — composition, light and atmosphere, technical quality, fit to the brief, and distinctiveness — and every entrant gets a score plus a few sentences of constructive feedback, usually within minutes of syncing. Winners are audited by a human before any announcement. The full breakdown is on the Judging & AI page.

A modern iPhone or Android from roughly the last three to four years is plenty. PeakShot is a website you can install straight from your browser — there is nothing to download from an app store. Once installed it behaves like an app: home-screen icon, full-screen walk mode, offline support.

No — and you could not use one if you had it. Entries are taken with the in-app phone camera only. That is the point: same spot, same time limit, same tools for everyone. Nobody buys their way onto the podium with a £3,000 lens, and no edit ever touches an entry.

Yes. Before you set off, you download the route pack — the route line, the map tiles for the walking corridor, and the zone data — so walk mode keeps working with no signal at all. Photos and walk telemetry queue safely on your phone and sync automatically when connectivity returns, even if that is back at the car.

There are four competition categories in Season 1:

Not every zone suits every category — part of the craft is matching the walk, the light, and the category on the day.

The beta season is played for glory: badges, the leaderboards, your peak-bagging ledger, and a place in the founding-member gallery. There are deliberately no prizes of monetary value in beta. Prize competitions are planned for later, run properly under UK skill-competition rules — PeakShot’s judged, skill-based format is built for exactly that.

Yes — PeakShot is 18+ during beta. You confirm your date of birth at signup. Younger brackets with proper safeguarding are on the roadmap for a later phase, but we will not rush that.

Beta Season — one eight-week competition season — opens in late summer 2026 in the Lake District. Places are limited, so join the waitlist and we will email you when the gate opens.

Your location is recorded only during an active walk — never in the background, never while you are just browsing. Walk tracks are private by default, they are never shown live to anyone (nobody can see that you are on a hill right now), and you can delete them at any time. The full detail is in our privacy policy.

The route lines themselves, no — scouting, drawing, and field-verifying them is PeakShot’s craft, so they stay in the app. Your own recorded walk tracks are a different matter: they are yours, and you can export them whenever you like.