Live at surfcampscout.com
Surf Camp Scout
A directory and review site for surf camps and surf spots, graded by the level you actually surf at.
The problem
Surf camp listings are written to sell beds. A beginner searching for their first trip is shown the same camps as someone who has surfed for ten years, described in language that flatters everybody and warns nobody. The result is people paying to be held under water at a break they had no business paddling out at.
What we did about it
Every camp and every spot is graded by skill level, by hand, from editorial research rather than scraped listing copy. The filters are the product: choose "beginner" and you see beginner breaks, not beginner-adjacent ones with an asterisk.
The hard part wasn't the code. It was deciding to leave camps out — a directory earns nothing from a listing it refuses to show you, and every incentive in the category points the other way.
How it's built
- Next.js (App Router) and TypeScript, deployed on Vercel.
- SQLite with Drizzle. Editorial content is the source of truth, held in the repo and reviewed like code.
- Static-first, content-heavy, and built for search — the pages are the product surface.
Still being built, in the open
Surf Camp Scout is live and openly labels itself a public beta — we're building it in the open rather than waiting for it to be finished. Being actively maintained is the one durable claim a small studio can make that a large one usually can't, so we'd rather keep shipping than say it.