SwellSlots

Surf Forecast Grid ~ 90's Arcade Art Style

Surfing

Weather

Sports

Hey Product Hunt 👋 Maker here. Stoked to finally share SwellSlots with you. A bit of the story behind it: THE DESIGN: Every surf app I've ever opened looks like a Bloomberg terminal crossed with a weather station dashboard. Grey charts, tiny arrows, decimal points everywhere. Surfing is the most joyful thing in the world — why does checking the forecast feel like filing a tax return? I wanted SwellSlots to feel closer to a Street Fighter 2 character select screen than a trading app. Bold, colourful, playful, instantly readable. You glance at the grid and you just *know*. Green slot = paddle out. Red slot = stay in bed. No PhD in meteorology required. THE SURF SPOT DATABASE PIPELINE: This was genuinely the hardest part. There is no clean, canonical, open database of surf spots on earth. Believe me, I looked. So we built our own pipeline — scraping, cross-referencing, cleaning, de-duplicating, geocoding, and then enriching each spot with the stuff that actually matters to surfers: wave type, preferred swell direction, ideal wind, best tide, skill level, bottom type. Thousands of spots, each one needing a sanity check. A lot of "wait, that spot is definitely not in a parking lot" moments. It's still growing, and the community can flag missing spots directly in the app. THE WEATHER PREDICTION GRANULARITY PROBLEM: Here's the dirty secret of surf forecasting: the raw data is coarser than you'd think. Offshore weather buoys are often 5km+ apart — sometimes much more. Global swell models run on grids that don't care that your reef bends the swell 30 degrees or that a headland shelters half the bay. So every surf forecast app is, to some degree, interpolating and guessing at the last mile. We're tackling this with smarter spot-level modelling (direction, exposure, local wind effects) and layering AI-written summaries on top that translate the messy numbers into honest plain English — "small and clean, fun for longboards" instead of "1.2m @ 11s SSW." It's an ongoing problem. We won't pretend it's solved. But we're chipping away at it. THE DESIGN IS USEFUL AND SIMPLE Ultimately SwellSlots is built around one question: *when should I paddle out this week?* Everything else — the charts, the tide tables, the wind roses — is secondary. Open the app, see your slots, make a call, go surf. That's it. If it takes more than 5 seconds to decide, we've failed. Free. No sign-up. No dark patterns. Just surf. Would love to hear: — What's your home break, and is it in our database? — What do you wish other surf apps would stop doing? — Any spots we should prioritise adding next? Thanks for checking it out 🤙