Tideline reads 14 buoys, swell models, and your local lifeguard flags to tell you exactly when your spot turns on — down to the 30-minute window. Surf, swim, paddle, or photograph.
Most apps give you a number. Tideline gives you a window — the exact stretch of the day your spot is worth the drive, with the confidence to skip it when it isn't.
We blend swell period, tide phase, and wind direction into a single rating per hour, then surface the window worth setting an alarm for.
We pull NDBC buoy data every 6 minutes and cross-check it against the forecast — so you see what the ocean is actually doing.
Set your conditions once. Tideline pings you the evening before a session clears your bar — never for the flat days.
A complication that puts the next window and tide turn one glance away.
340 live cams, refreshed each minute, with overnight time-lapse replay.
Anonymous check-ins estimate the lineup so you can pick the quieter break two coves down.
Tideline runs the GFS-Wave, ECMWF, and our coastal refraction model side by side. When they disagree, we tell you — so a low-confidence Saturday never sends you on a wasted drive.
Check today's conditions for nothing. Upgrade when you want the 7-day, the alerts, and the cams. Cancel from the app in two taps.
For the weekend paddle when you just need today's read.
For the people who chase the swell, not the calendar.
For the club, the family, or the morning crew that carpools.
"I stopped driving 40 minutes to a flat beach. The confidence band is the feature nobody else has — it's saved me more dawns than I can count."
"As a swim coach I need water temp and current, not surf hype. Tideline is the only app that treats open-water swimmers like first-class users."
"The watch complication ended the 6am 'is it worth it' debate. One glance, back to sleep or out the door. Worth the $6 ten times over."
Can't find it? Email the two-person team at [email protected] — we surf, so replies skew early.
We ingest NOAA GFS-Wave and ECMWF WAM swell models, NDBC buoy observations every 6 minutes, and station tide harmonics. Our own coastal refraction layer then bends that open-ocean swell into each individual spot's bathymetry.
It's a weighted blend of swell height and period, the angle between swell and the spot's optimal window, wind speed/direction relative to the coast, and tide phase. You can re-weight every factor per spot — a longboarder and a shortboarder grade the same wave differently.
Yes. Pro caches the next 48 hours for your saved spots whenever you have a connection, so the tide chart, hourly windows, and your session log all work in airplane mode on the bluff.
Drop a pin anywhere on the map and we generate a forecast from the nearest buoy and bathymetry tile. Custom spots stay private to you unless you choose to publish them to the community map.
Location is used only to suggest nearby spots and is never sold. Crowd-factor check-ins are aggregated and anonymized — we can't tie a lineup count back to any single user, and you can turn check-ins off entirely.
Set up your home spot in under a minute. The next time it fires, your phone will know before you do.