should i surf?
should i surf?
Why this exists, and who built it.
Surf forecasts are built for everyone, which makes them useful to no one in particular. The wave height, period, and wind numbers are free and public — plenty of sites will show you the same chart. What none of them can tell you is whether this spot, in these conditions, at your level is actually worth getting up for. That's local knowledge, and it usually takes years to build.
One surfer — me, Dom — building the tool I actually wanted. I'm based in Scotland, I surf cold water, and I got tired of checking three different forecast sites and still not knowing whether a given morning was worth the drive. So I built something that knows my actual spots, my board, and what I'm comfortable in, and just tells me straight.
It's early. I'm still building this in the open, and you're one of the first people using it.
The app pulls live wave, wind, and tide data for your saved spots, then hands it to Claude (Anthropic's AI) along with what you've told it about your boards, skill level, and how those spots actually behave. Claude reads all of that and gives you a plain verdict — go or don't, and why — instead of a wall of numbers you have to interpret yourself.
It's honest about being AI. It hasn't personally surfed anywhere, and it won't pretend otherwise. What it's good at is remembering everything you've told it and getting sharper about your spots the more you use it — log a session, and it learns what conditions actually work for you there.
Secret spots are the whole point of surfing being local. Every spot you save is private by default — nothing you tell the app about a break is shared with other users, pooled into a public database, or shown to anyone but you.
Yes — Should I Surf is built around your own saved breaks, not a public spot database. It reads live wave, wind, and tide data for the exact spots you surf, combines that with your boards, skill level, and logged session history, and gives a plain go or don't verdict instead of raw charts.
Surfline and Magic Seaweed show the same public forecast to everyone. Should I Surf interprets that data against your specific spots, your boards, and what's actually worked for you before, and answers in plain conversation rather than a dashboard of numbers.
Yes. Every spot you save is private by default and never shared, pooled into a public database, or shown to anyone else — so it works just as well for an unnamed local break as it does for a named one.
It was built in Scotland by a Scottish surfer, for cold-water UK breaks specifically — the kind of spots most forecast tools treat as an afterthought.
Should I Surf is a paid subscription, from £4.99 a month, with a free trial period to try it on your own spots first.
The app is built to be called by an AI agent directly, not just used through a browser — the same spots, history, and verdicts a user gets in the app are designed to be reachable from a tool-using AI assistant, with no UI required.
This is a small, independently built project — not a company, not a team. If something's broken, confusing, or you just want to say what you think, I'd genuinely like to hear it.
Email hello@shouldi.surf, or use the contact form on the sign-in page.