Search & Rescue

Resgrid for Search & Rescue Teams

Page the team, see who's available, track members in the field, and document every mission for grants and reimbursement. Resgrid is the callout and coordination platform built for volunteer SAR — wilderness, urban, K9, dive, and mounted units alike.

Free for up to 10 users & units • No contracts • Set up in about 15 minutes

SAR's coordination problem

Missions start with scattered volunteers, unknown availability, and a clock that's already running.

Callouts by phone tree

The sheriff calls the coordinator, who texts three group chats and starts phoning down a list. Thirty minutes later you still don't know if you have a dive team.

Who's qualified for this mission?

Rope, swiftwater, K9, medical, tracker — qualifications live in the coordinator's head or a stale spreadsheet, not where the callout decision happens.

No picture of the field

Once teams deploy, base tracks them with radio check-ins and guesswork. Command can't see where members and vehicles actually are.

Grant paperwork after every mission

Hours, personnel, and mission details must be reconstructed from memory for FEMA reimbursement, county contracts, and grant applications.

How Resgrid solves it

From tone-out to demobilization, Resgrid handles the callout, the accountability, and the paperwork trail.

One-tap team callouts

Launch a mission callout by push, SMS, email, and voice call at once. Members respond with availability and ETA — you know in minutes whether you can field the mission.

Qualification-aware rostering

Track certifications and specialty qualifications per member — rope, swiftwater, K9, EMT, tracker. Dispatch by role to alert exactly the skill set the mission needs.

Live field tracking

See responding and deployed members on a live map via the Responder app, and track vehicles with the Unit app or hardware GPS trackers through built-in Traccar support.

Mission documentation

Timestamped notes with GPS, photos and file attachments, personnel logs, and full call records — exportable as PDF for the sheriff, FEMA, or your grant writer.

Training & readiness

Schedule trainings with RSVP and attendance tracking. Membership hour requirements and team readiness stop being a end-of-year reconstruction project.

Works on your infrastructure

Open source and self-hostable — run Resgrid on your own server if your operating area or agency requires it, with full control of your data.

Replace the improvised stack

Most SAR teams coordinate life-safety missions with consumer apps and spreadsheets — or pay for modular platforms that charge per capability.

What you use today

Examples

Typical cost

Included in Resgrid

Team management platform

D4H modules

$1,000–$3,000+ / yr

Personnel, missions & records in one

Phone trees & group chats

Call-down lists, GroupMe, WhatsApp

Free, but slow & unaccountable

Multi-channel callouts with responses

Availability polling

Doodle, text threads

30+ min per callout

One-tap responding statuses & ETAs

Qualification spreadsheets

Excel, Google Sheets

Stale the day after updating

Certifications with expirations & roles

Vehicle GPS trackers

Consumer trackers, separate AVL

$15–$30 per vehicle / mo

Traccar hardware GPS + Unit app AVL

Mission logs & hour tracking

Paper forms, after-the-fact emails

Hours per mission

Auto-timestamped logs & PDF export

Typical spend: $1,500–$5,000 per year plus volunteer hours lost to coordination overhead. Resgrid's free tier covers small teams outright, and entity pricing stays grant-budget friendly as you grow.

Faster missions, easier grants

In SAR the return isn't just money — it's minutes off every callout and documentation that funds next year's gear.

Minutes

to a staffed callout, not half an hour

$1.5K–$5K

typical yearly tool consolidation

100%

of missions documented automatically

$0

to start on the free tier

Time back

  • Availability answers arrive in minutes instead of a phone-tree hour
  • Mission logs build themselves from statuses, notes, and timestamps
  • Dispatch by qualification instead of scrolling a spreadsheet mid-callout
  • Training attendance and member hours tally automatically all year

Budget back

  • Replace modular team-management subscriptions with one flat platform
  • Clean mission records strengthen FEMA reimbursement and grant claims
  • Free tier for small teams; nonprofit discounts as you grow
  • Self-host for free on the open-source platform if budget demands it

Savings estimates based on typical published pricing for team management and tracking tools; results vary by team size and mission volume.

The next callout could start in minutes

Stand up your team on Resgrid this week — the free tier covers small units, and your first callout will show you what the phone tree was costing.

Open source • Self-host or let us host it • Cancel anytime