The alternative listing services

Where a cache lives is older than the software

The question this section answers is older than any of the sites that try to answer it. A cache is a container in a place, and the coordinates that lead you to it are just data, data that has to live somewhere, be searchable, and stay correct as containers get soaked, muggled and replaced.

Geocaching.com solved that first and solved it at scale, and for most people that is the end of the matter. But the solution carries consequences: a single database means a single set of rules about what counts as a cache, a single moderation queue, a single interface, and a single company deciding when the map changes. Every alternative listing service in this section exists because somebody thought at least one of those consequences was worth taking on.

Some of them were commercial ventures. Some were national projects built by volunteers who wanted cache types their own community valued and the larger service did not list. One was launched by Garmin, ran for a few years and was shut down. The pages below take them one at a time: what it is, who runs it, what it lists that others do not, and whether it answers today.

What “still running” means here

Every service named in this section was checked with a live request on the date shown at the foot of each page. That is a low bar (a site can answer and still be abandoned) so where a service is technically up but no longer maintained, the page says so and explains how that was established: when its last visible change was, whether new caches are still being listed, and whether anyone is answering its forums.

Where a service is gone, the page says when it went and what evidence fixes the date. Usually that is an archived capture of its own front page, which is a far better witness than a forum thread remembering it years later.

Why a second database is worth having at all

The obvious objection to every service in this section is that the hobby already has one that works. Splitting a finite number of cachers across several sites makes each of them thinner, and a thin listing service is a worse listing service. That objection is real, and most of the failures described in these pages are versions of it.

There are two arguments on the other side, and neither depends on any alternative ever becoming large.

The first is rules. A single database means one definition of what a cache is. Cache types that a national community values, virtuals, moving caches, types that were retired centrally years ago — exist elsewhere or not at all. Several of the services below were founded precisely to list something the largest service had stopped accepting.

The second is custody. Coordinates, logs and photographs accumulated over two decades are a community record, and a record held in one place by one company is held on that company’s terms. Nothing here suggests those terms have been abused. It is simply that the people who built the alternatives thought a single point of custody was worth not having.

The problem every alternative has to solve

A listing service is only useful when it has caches, and cache owners only place caches where there are finders. That circular dependency is the reason most of these projects stall, and it explains the shape of the ones that did not.

The services that survived solved it geographically rather than globally. A national network needs only enough density in one country to make a day out viable, and once that exists the loop closes on its own: local cachers list locally, local finders find locally, and the site stops needing anybody outside its borders. The Opencaching networks that are still running are the ones that reached that threshold in their own country.

The ones that failed almost all tried to be international from the start, which meant spreading a small number of listings across a large map. The one configuration in which a cache database is guaranteed to look empty to everybody who visits it.