A surf app with no subscription: what it costs over a year

Most people who pay for a surf app use it for one thing, most days: deciding whether to go. It is worth knowing what that costs over a year, and what else the money buys.

What surf apps cost over a year

Public prices as of September 2026. They change, so check before you sign up or cancel.

• Surfline Premium: about $120 a year. A version with ads on the cams costs $69.99, and Premium+ at $149.99 covers three accounts, about $50 each.
• Windguru Pro: about $25 a year. The free version shows the raw model data.
• Swellnet, in Australia: free, Lite and Pro plans. The full forecasts and the cams sit in the paid ones.
• Tide apps in the UK: mostly free with ads. The UKHO's own ADMIRALTY EasyTide gives today and the next six days for free.
• Sendoa: €4.99, once, and the App Store shows the price in your currency. No renewal.

For a lot of British surfers the free default used to be Magicseaweed. Surfline, which bought it in 2017, shut it down in May 2023, and the site now sends you to Surfline. Since then the choice has mostly been between paying Surfline every year, reading raw model data, or piecing it together from a tide table and a wind forecast.

What a subscription actually gets you

To be fair about it, the comparison has to start here.

Cams. Surfline's network is the largest there is, by its own account, and nothing computed replaces watching the water before an hour's drive. If that is what you open it for, the subscription earns its keep.

Forecasters. People write up today, tomorrow and the days worth watching. Someone who knows a region picks up things a model misses.

Depth. Sixteen days ahead, alerts, and thousands of spots worldwide. If you travel to surf, coverage matters.

Sendoa has no cams, no forecasters and no sixteen-day forecast, and it covers 227 spots in six countries. Better to say so up front.

The question that decides

When you open the app at first light, what are you actually after?

If it is "do I get up, and for which break", that is a yes or a no with a time attached. Paying $120 a year for it means paying a subscription for a decision.

If it is "I want to see the water before I drive", the cam is worth its price, and no computed app will give you that.

Both are fair uses. They just don't cost the same.

What Sendoa does, exactly

One sentence per spot, the window, and the reasons. Your favourites side by side, so you can pick in three seconds.

The tides are recomputed on your iPhone from public harmonic constants, NOAA's in the US and TICON-4's in the UK, Australia and South Africa, so they work with no signal. On a coast where the tide decides the session, the answer is built around the tide window, not a tide table you have to read. And we publish our error, port by port, against real tide gauge readings, the bad ports included: the full table.

No subscription, no ads, no account, no tracker. Nothing leaves your phone except the forecast request and what you choose to send us.

There is one option, Secret spots, €4.99 once as well, for adding your own breaks with the same forecast. The app is complete without it, and Family Sharing covers both. A second paywall hidden behind the first would be exactly what we hold against the others, so it is said here.

Frequently asked

Is there a surf forecast app without a subscription? Yes. Windguru has a free version with the raw model data. Sendoa is a one-off purchase with no subscription and no ads, and gives the answer per spot rather than the data.

Is Surfline worth it? If you use the cams, yes: nothing computed replaces them. If you mostly open it to decide whether to go, you are paying every year for an answer a one-off app can give.

What happened to Magicseaweed? Surfline bought it in 2017 and shut it down in May 2023. The site now redirects to Surfline.

What if I change phones? The purchase is tied to your Apple ID, so it comes with you. Family Sharing is on.