The whole list.
With quantities.
Twelve things. This is the entire contents of a go-bag — ours and anybody else's. Buy it wherever you like.
Bug-out bag, 72-hour kit, grab bag: same thing, different name. A shelter-in-place kit is the genuinely different one, and it stays home. We wrote the decoder.
We publish this because a standard you can't reach without buying from us isn't a standard. It's a catalogue.
| Component | How many | Retail |
|---|---|---|
| Backpack50 litres. Ours is 22 × 16 × 10 in and packs out around 22 lb. Try one loaded before you trust it. | 1 | $62.95 |
| Work glovesCarbon-knuckle, not gardening gloves. Everything after a disaster has an edge on it. | 1 pr | $19.99 |
| Emergency ration packs475 kcal a pack, eaten straight from the wrapper — 7,125 kcal in the bag. Twenty-year shelf life; most emergency bars manage five. Sold in twelves, so you buy two packs.Leaves you 9 spare | 15 | $75.98 |
| Water pouches4.2 oz each, five-year life, US Coast Guard approved. Sealed pouches survive a hot car and a hard knock; bottles don't. Sold in twelves, so you buy two packs.Leaves you 8 spare | 16 | $37.98 |
| Fire starter kitFerro rod and tinder. Works wet, works cold, never runs out of fuel. | 1 | $27.95 |
| Emergency radioSolar, hand crank and battery, with the NOAA weather band. Three ways to power the one thing that tells you what is actually happening. | 1 | $26.46 |
| Medical kitA Rhino Rescue Ready Kit — a proper one, in a pouch you can find in the dark. Built for what a household actually meets in a bad week: cuts, burns, a bad fall, and no quick trip to urgent care. | 1 | $25.99 |
| Power bankCharges three ways — solar, hand crank or USB — and puts power back out over three cable types or wirelessly. Carries a light of its own. | 1 | $21.28 |
| FlashlightBattery LED — the plain one, and deliberately the third light in the bag. The radio and the power bank both carry a light and both recharge; this one runs on cells. No single point of failure on light. | 1 | $13.99 |
| Multi-toolPliers and a blade at minimum. | 1 | $9.99 |
| Water filter strawRemoves bacteria and parasites. Three days of water for four people weighs about 100 lb — this is why nobody carries it. | 1 | $7.99 |
| Mylar blanketsWeigh nothing, cost nothing, and are the difference on a cold night.Usually sold in fours | 2 | $1.74 |
| Build it yourself | $332.29 | |
Every line priced at ordinary single-unit retail, August 2026, against the same product we ship — not a cheaper lookalike. Prices move; treat this as the shape, not a quote.
A closer look
About $332 and an afternoon.
Or $399 and it arrives packed.
The difference is $67. Part of that is the boring part: seven separate orders, a week of deliveries, and two things you have to buy in the wrong quantity.
The rest is the judgement calls. Which filter is rated for parasites. How many calories a person actually needs for three days. Whether a five-year bar and a twenty-year bar are the same purchase. They are not, and the label won't tell you.
Mostly you are not paying for the nylon. You are paying for the list — and for the fact that somebody already made every one of those calls, then went and priced the alternative so you could check the work.
I spent twenty years in the Marine Corps — ten in the infantry, ten in logistics — and retired a Master Sergeant. For the back half of that, my job was working out what several hundred people needed to carry, and living with what happened when I got it wrong. I've also been on the patrol that was supposed to take two hours and took three days, which is where the number 72 stopped being a marketing figure for me.
Either way you end up at Level 2. I'd rather you got there than bought from me.
And the half you can't buy at a hardware store
Every kit ships with the S.A.F.E. Digital Vault — 69 pages across sixteen documents, including TEN MINUTES — a ninety-two card family readiness game with its own rules and scoring — plus the Breadcrumbs system, the family plan, the annual drill toolkit and the insurance claims checklist. That is the actual answer to “why not just build it.”
See all 69 pages →Packed by hand, one at a time
There is no production line. Every bag is checked against this same list by the person who chose what goes in it.
The list is the easy half
Owning these twelve things makes you Level 2 on paper. It does not tell you where your family meets when the phones are down, whether your documents leave the house with you, or whether you could get someone down a flight of stairs who can't walk. Those are free, and they're the part almost everybody skips.
The 72-hour checklist & SAFE plan — free
