We Built a Go-Bag Planner Because an Earthquake Reminded Us We're Not Prepared
A few small earthquakes rattled through recently. Nothing dramatic. Just enough to make you look at the ceiling, then look at your emergency bag, then realize your emergency bag has granola bars from 2022 and a flashlight with dead batteries.
That was the situation. Time to refresh the go-bags.
The Problem That Grew
Updating one bag is straightforward. You pull everything out, check expiration dates, replace what’s stale, and repack. Thirty minutes, tops.
But then you start thinking about the people around you who don’t have one at all. What do they need? It depends on where they live, what emergencies they’re likely to face, whether they have kids, pets, medications. There’s a surprising amount to figure out when you’re starting from zero.
And then you start thinking: we literally build software that figures out what fits into containers.
So We Built It
The Emergency Go-Bag Planner is a free tool that helps you plan emergency bags for your household. It works in three steps:
Tell it about your family. How many people, ages, any special needs. The basics.
Answer a short quiz. Based on your location and circumstances, it figures out which emergencies you should prepare for: earthquakes, wildfires, hurricanes, severe winter storms, whatever applies to you.
Get a personalized packing plan. The tool recommends what should go in each person’s bag, with quantities and priorities tailored to your situation. Then our packing algorithm (the same one we use for shipping optimization) figures out what actually fits in different bag sizes.
That last part is the bit that’s uniquely us. Plenty of emergency preparedness checklists exist online. But “here’s a list of 47 items” isn’t the same as “here’s what fits in a 40L backpack, and here’s what you’ll need a second bag for.” That’s a packing problem. We solve packing problems.
How It Works Under the Hood
A few LLM calls handle the recommendation logic, analyzing your household composition and risk profile to generate a tailored item list. This isn’t a static checklist. A family with an infant in earthquake country gets different recommendations than a solo adult in a hurricane zone.
Once the items are determined, StoaPack’s 3D packing engine takes over. It evaluates different bag sizes, figures out optimal placement, and tells you exactly what fits where. Same algorithm, same constraints engine, same optimization. Just applied to backpacks instead of shipping boxes.
It’s a tangential use of our core technology, but it turns out “what fits in this container” is a question that comes up in a lot of contexts.
Why Free?
This isn’t a product. It’s not a lead generator. There’s no email capture, no account required, no upsell.
We build packing optimization software for e-commerce and logistics. That’s the business. But the underlying technology, figuring out what fits where, is useful beyond shipping boxes. Emergency preparedness felt like a good place to put it to work for the community.
The tool is completely free and anonymous. Use it, share it, tell us if something’s off.
The Practical Takeaway
If the recent earthquakes (or hurricanes, or wildfires, or that one ice storm) have been nagging at the back of your mind, now’s a good time to do something about it. Emergency preparedness is one of those things that feels overwhelming until you actually start, and then it’s mostly just a packing problem.
We happen to be pretty good at those.
Plan your family’s emergency go-bags at stoapack.stoalogistics.com/go-bag. It’s free, anonymous, and takes about five minutes.