Geocaching.com
👤 Jeremy Irish, Bryan Roth & Elias Alvord (When GPS went civilian in 2000, they grabbed geocaching.com and became the hobby's one canonical HQ. First movers, no VC.)🌐 site
Hiding boxes in the woods became a bootstrapped subscription business — because the players build the map for free.
Will it work? · our read
Unbeatable database. One global cache registry, built free by volunteers and 1.2B logs — a real moat, but it rides on volunteer goodwill and free apps that map the same coordinates.
01How the money moves
361K volunteers hide 3.4M caches, free
→
Anyone plays free on the app and site
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Power users pay $39.99/yr for Premium
02The numbers
3.4M
active caches
newsroom
1.2B
finds logged
newsroom
$39.99
premium / year
geocaching
Premium held at $30/yr for 21 years; the first-ever raise came in June 2023. pricing update
Private and bootstrapped — no revenue disclosed. Our EST of about $20-30M/yr comes from about 90 staff on a roughly $40/yr subscription.
🔒
The facts are free. The judgment is for members.
You've seen how the money moves, the numbers, and every source — free, on all 365 cases, always. Members get the part you can't look up: why it won · where the moat really is · how it dies · how it beats its rivals — plus the 🚀 launchpad prompt that turns any case into a plan for your business.
Sources stay public, always · cancel anytime · 14-day refund
(demo: preview the full teardown)Sourcesupdated · daily
Geocaching Newsroom: Fast FactsGeocaching Newsroom: PremiumGeocaching BlogGeekWireWikipedia: Geocaching
Revenue is undisclosed — Groundspeak is private and bootstrapped (no VC; GeekWire named it Bootstrapper of the Year in 2014). The "about $20-30M" figure is our EST from roughly 90 employees running a roughly $40/yr subscription — it is NOT a reported number, and third-party revenue trackers for this company vary wildly, so treat it as a rough band. First-party and solid: 3.4M active caches, 1.2B logs, 191 countries, about 90 staff, and the $39.99/yr price (Geocaching Newsroom + blog). Premium member count is not public. No fabricated drama: the win was 25 years of patient, volunteer-fueled compounding, not one clever stroke. [our read] flags: the revenue estimate and the "volunteers walk" failure mode are our inference, not company statements. We never score you.