News, updates,
and education

What changed. If you're on the free plan, you can now download your top 10 candidates in any of the formats Pro and Business get — GPX (handheld GPS units), KML (Google Earth), CSV (spreadsheets), and GeoJSON (QGIS, mapping libraries, anything modern). Same export buttons, same file shapes. No upsell wall.

What stayed the same. Pro and Business still get the full ranked list, not just the top 10. The field-package ZIP, Ridgewalk Plan PDF + GPX, and multi-date DEM comparison are still Pro features. Free is still 3 analyses per week and 5 km² per scan.

Why we did it. The most common request we got was variations of "I just want to be able to take this with me." That's a fair ask. Pro should be about volume — bigger search areas, more scans per day, route planning, multi-date comparison — not whether you can hand a coordinate to your GPS. So we moved the wall.

Free users with existing saved analyses can re-export them; the cap applies to whatever's currently visible in the candidate list.

If anything in the export looks off — a missing field, a coordinate that doesn't match the popup — tell us and we'll dig in.

We deleted half our header. The two stacked bars at the top of the app are now one. The CaveFinder header merged into the sibling-app bar, which gives you about 50 px of vertical room back — most valuable on phones, where every pixel of map matters. The Simple / Pro toggle is gone too; your plan is the mode now, no extra switch to think about.

Drop a pin before you've run anything (Pro). The Saved Points panel was nested inside the results section — meaning it disappeared the moment you hit "New Search." If you wanted to drop a custom pin to mark a parking spot, you had to wait until after an analysis finished. The panel now lives on the Setup tab too, accessible before, during, and after.

Public-land polygons stop swallowing your clicks. The USFS and NPS shaded overlays were intercepting clicks — if you tried to draw a search box or drop a pin over a national forest, the click landed on the polygon instead of the map. They stay informative now, but they're no longer in your way.

Sign-in form survives a stray click. If you clicked just outside an input field while typing your password — aiming for the field and missing by a few pixels — the sign-in window was closing on you. Now it doesn't. Use the × or Escape to close.

Errors don't strand you anymore. When an analysis failed mid-run, the progress overlay would silently vanish on mobile, leaving you with no controls and no obvious way to retry without a page refresh. You now see a clear error message and your controls come back so you can fix the search and try again.

Verify-email false-positive fixed. A small group of newly-registered users were seeing "please verify your email" errors after they had already verified through id.cavefinder.app. The error path was reading from the wrong place. Fixed.

Search finds what you meant. "Mammoth Cave" was returning tiny hamlets in Utah and California ahead of the National Park in Kentucky. Geocoding suggestions are now ranked toward the kinds of features cavers actually search for — parks, protected areas, named caves — instead of raw OSM importance.

Faster page loads. JavaScript and CSS are minified at deploy time now, shaving about a fifth off the static payload. Smaller download, fewer bytes to parse, snappier first paint.

Smaller stuff than the headline features, but small things add up. As always, tell us if any of this still feels off.

Marking candidates on old saved results now works. If you saved an analysis, came back to it a week later, and tried to mark a candidate as "Not a cave" or "Cave confirmed" — nothing would happen. Silent failure, no error. Same for trying to generate a Ridgewalk plan from an old saved result. Both are fixed. You can mark and plan freely on analyses of any age now.

The only user-visible difference: generating a Ridgewalk plan on a saved analysis older than 24 hours takes about 5–15 seconds longer the first time (we quietly re-download the elevation data in the background). Subsequent plans on the same result are instant.

Scoring model refined. We ran the scoring engine against our latest cave-validation set and retuned the per-method confidence weights. The practical effect: on fine-resolution (1 m) LiDAR, known caves land higher in the ranked list more often. Coarser resolution (the default 10 m for most searches) is unaffected. No action needed — future analyses automatically use the updated scoring. Your existing saved results keep their original scores; they're a snapshot of the scoring model at the time you ran them.

Reliability fix. A server-side edge case was occasionally causing analyses to silently get stuck at a mid-progress percentage. We traced it to how our scientific-computing libraries interact with our worker-process setup, and fixed the root cause. If an analysis ever does fail now, you'll get a clear error message you can retry from, instead of a frozen progress bar.

As always, let us know if anything else feels off.

Mobile "Find Caves" gives you real answers now. If you drew a search area larger than your plan allows and tapped Find Caves, the app was silently ignoring you — no error, no explanation, nothing visible. That's fixed. You'll now see a clear message telling you the size and your plan's limit, on both mobile and desktop. And if you're not signed in, the sign-in prompt appears reliably instead of sometimes-not.

No more frozen map. On mobile, if you closed the sign-in prompt without signing in, the draw and find controls were disappearing and leaving you stuck staring at the map with no way forward. That's fixed — close the prompt and all your controls come right back so you can adjust your search and try again.

Larger custom map overlays (Pro). Pro users can now upload GeoTIFF overlays up to 500 MB per file (about three times the previous 150 MB cap), keep 8 loaded at a time, and use 1 GB of total overlay storage. Large rasters are automatically sized for web display so a giant elevation tile renders smoothly without rejecting the file. Big uploads are processed one at a time on the server so one person's 500 MB overlay doesn't slow anyone else down.

Clearer upload errors. If an overlay upload fails, you'll see why — "File too large", "Server busy", "Invalid format" — instead of a generic "Upload failed" toast with no information.

Overlays are session-scoped. We're being explicit about this: uploaded overlays are processed for your current session and auto-expire after 24 hours. Export your work (GPX/KML/CSV) before leaving. Persistent overlay storage is on the roadmap for a future paid tier.

Onboarding screens fit on any phone. The welcome screen after accepting the terms was getting cut off at the top or bottom on some phones (iPhones with the URL bar visible in particular). It now scales correctly everywhere. If you're in Pro mode you also see a Pro-mode walkthrough highlighting the advanced overlays and export tools, rather than the generic Simple-mode intro.

As always, reach out if anything else feels off — small friction points add up, and we'd rather hear about them.

Rectangle drawing on desktop. Several desktop users reported that drawing a search box required clicking two separate corners instead of just dragging. This was a bug in how we handled the drawing tool on non-touch devices — it's fixed. On any device, you now just click and drag to draw your search area, the same way you'd expect.

Map stays where you put it. When analysis finished, the map was auto-zooming to fit the results — which sounds helpful but was actually annoying if you'd already zoomed in or were comparing a specific spot. The auto-zoom is gone. Your map view is yours now.

Subscription pricing. If you tried to upgrade to Pro and saw a price that didn't match what the pricing page said, that's fixed — the checkout now correctly shows $9.99/month.

As always, reach out through Contact if anything feels off.

Password reset. Several users reported that clicking the reset link in the email didn't bring up the password reset screen. This was a routing bug — the link pointed to the homepage instead of the app. It's fixed. If you've been stuck unable to get back into your account, try the Forgot Password link again and it will work now.

Upgrade to Pro on mobile. The upgrade screen was getting cut off on smaller phones, and opening it from Account settings left the account panel still visible behind it. Both fixed — the screen now closes properly before the upgrade modal appears, and the layout fits comfortably on any standard phone without scrolling.

Account screen — cleaner by default. The Settings section (basemap, units, coordinate format, and display options) is now collapsed behind a toggle. For most people those defaults are fine, and the cleaner default view makes it easier to find what you actually came for — subscription status and usage. Tap Settings to expand when you need it.

Questions or issues? Reach out — we read every message.

Depth accuracy. We rebuilt how CaveFinder calculates depth. Previously, some candidates showed depths far larger than reality — the algorithm was measuring against distant terrain instead of the actual rim. Now depth is compared to the surrounding terrain at close range, so what you see matches what you'd estimate standing at the edge. If depth values seemed inflated before, they should be noticeably more realistic now.

Mobile overhaul. We went through the entire mobile experience and fixed the things that made it frustrating to use in the field. Map layer controls now collapse into a small arrow so the map gets your full screen, and they sit below the search bar so nothing overlaps. During analysis, the big orange button shows live progress with the fun caving messages and percentage. When results arrive, the panel slides up automatically — no more hunting for them. A toggle button lets you flip between the results list and the map with one tap. And refreshing the page no longer zooms you into a previous analysis — the map stays where you left it.

Full details in the changelog. Feedback welcome at contact.

We heard you: bouncing between the map and billing shouldn't be a maze. CaveFinder now has a focused Account & billing page where you can sign in, see your tier and daily usage, and jump into Stripe's secure portal to update your card, grab invoices, or cancel at period end — all in plain language, with steps spelled out.

Inside the app, the Account panel got the same spirit: clearer labels for Pro and Business, a short note on how cancellation works through Stripe, and a direct link to that page when you want the full story.

For a line-by-line list of changes, see the changelog. Questions? We're here.

When you generate a Ridgewalk Plan, the export may include CaveFinder_Ridgewalk_Plan.html: one file with maps and branding inlined so you can open it from your phone or laptop without unpacking a folder of PNGs.

Optional details (HTML-to-PDF for the screen PDF, environment flags) are in the changelog.

CaveFinder started with a simple question: can LiDAR terrain data tell you where to look for caves before you drive out to a ridge?

High-resolution elevation data exists for most of the US at 1-meter resolution, but there was no accessible tool for cavers to analyze it for cave entrance signatures. The data has been sitting in public USGS repositories, and it turns out that terrain features associated with cave entrances are visible in that data if you know what to look for.

CaveFinder automates that analysis. You draw a box on a map, we pull the LiDAR data, run the terrain analysis, and give you a ranked list of candidates with coordinates, confidence scores, and terrain views. It's not magic and it's not perfect — but it gives you a much better starting point than staring at topo maps and guessing.

The free tier gives you 3 analyses per week with the top 10 candidates — including GPX, KML, CSV, and GeoJSON export of those top 10. Pro includes everything — all candidates with full-list export, the Ridgewalk Planner, multi-date DEM comparison, and larger scan areas.

We're a small operation (Buzzy LLC, based in New Mexico) and we're building this because we're cavers who wanted this tool to exist. Feedback from the caving community is what drives development — if you have thoughts, reach out at help@cavefinder.app.

LiDAR works by bouncing laser pulses off the ground from aircraft, creating elevation maps accurate to centimeters. Millions of laser returns per flight build a point cloud that captures the shape of the landscape in extraordinary detail.

Unlike aerial photography, LiDAR penetrates tree canopy — it sees the ground, not the leaves. This is critical for caving, because the most interesting karst terrain is often in heavily forested areas where surface features are completely hidden from view.

For cavers, this means terrain features that are completely invisible under forest cover become visible in the data. Sinkholes, collapse features, cliff lines, and subtle depressions that you'd walk right past in the field show up clearly in LiDAR-derived elevation models.

The USGS 3DEP program has been systematically collecting LiDAR across the US, creating a publicly available dataset that covers most of the country at 1-meter resolution. It's one of the most underused public datasets for cave exploration.

CaveFinder uses this data to identify terrain signatures that correlate with cave entrances — turning raw elevation data into a prioritized list of places worth investigating.