What happened to the alternatives

The list

The alternatives that have closed or gone quiet do not form a tidy category. They were launched for different reasons, by different kinds of people, with different amounts of money behind them.

Garmin’s opencaching.com launched in 2010 with an open API and a finder-rating system that improved on the owner-declared difficulty numbers everyone else used. It closed in 2015. Its listings did not transfer anywhere.

Navicache ran from 2001, was sold in 2012 to owners with a detailed relaunch plan, and then did not visibly change for a decade. Its front page still carried a copyright line ending in 2011 when it was last seen in January 2022. The domain now redirects to something unrelated.

Terracaching took the opposite approach: rather than compete on volume it made listing deliberately hard, requiring sponsorship from existing members and peer rating of every cache. It never grew large and it is still answering.

Beyond these are the ventures that left almost no trace: sites announced in forum threads, live for a year or two, gone before anyone wrote down what they had been trying to do.

What the closures have in common

The intuitive explanation is money: the small ones ran out and the big one did not care enough. The record does not support it.

The best-funded alternative the hobby has had lasted four years. The volunteer projects that launched around the same time are still running. Whatever kills a listing service, underfunding is not reliably it.

A better explanation is that a listing service has two requirements and they are unequal. The first is software, which is a solved problem, anyone competent can build a database of coordinates with logs attached. The second is caches in the ground near where people actually walk, and that cannot be bought, engineered or announced. It has to accumulate, slowly, from owners who choose to spend their effort there.

That second requirement has a nasty property: it is circular. Nobody browses a service with no caches, so no owner lists on it, so it has no caches. Every alternative that has survived broke that loop the same way, by starting inside a community that already existed offline, with its own forums, clubs and habits, rather than by building a better website and waiting.

What it means for a cache owner

Two practical consequences follow, and both are unglamorous.

The first is that cross-listing has a cost you only pay later. Two listings means two log streams and two copies of the coordinates. After the container is moved fifteen metres, and containers get moved, those copies disagree until somebody fixes both. Owners who cross-list should decide up front which listing is authoritative.

The second is that a listing is not a backup. If a service closes, your description, your hint and years of logs go with it unless you exported them yourself. Nothing about the closures above gave owners a comfortable window to act in. The one that gave the least warning was the one with a company behind it.

Why this page exists

There is a version of this subject that reads as an obituary column, and there is a version that reads as advocacy for whichever service the writer prefers. Neither is much use.

What is useful is the shape of the thing: which services existed, what each was trying to do differently, when it stopped, and what the evidence for that date is. Where a closure date here is firm it comes from an archived capture of the service’s own front page. Where it is approximate, this page says approximate.

What the survivors did differently

Set against the closures, the services still running are a short list, and the things they have in common are not the things anybody predicted.

None of them won on features. None of them was the best-funded, and the best-funded ones are on the list of closures. What the survivors share is that they were small, national, and volunteer-run, the shape the Opencaching nodes took — which is to say they had low enough costs that nobody had to decide whether to keep paying, and a community close enough that the site’s failure would have been somebody’s personal loss.

That is an uncomfortable conclusion for anyone hoping to build a serious competitor, because it suggests the successful strategy is to stop trying to be one. The services that positioned themselves as alternatives to the largest site are almost all gone. The ones that positioned themselves as the local service for their own country are almost all still here.

How to tell a quiet service from a dead one

The distinction matters if you are deciding whether to place a cache somewhere, and it is not answered by whether the site loads.

Look for new listings, not new posts. A cache published in the last few months is proof that somebody is still reviewing submissions, which is the function that actually has to be alive. Look for a moderator answering something in the forum, rather than the forum merely existing. And look at the copyright line and the news page, which are the two things nobody remembers to update on a site they have stopped maintaining.

A service can serve pages for years after the last person stopped looking after it. Several of the entries above did exactly that, which is why the dates on this page are tied to evidence of activity rather than to the day the domain finally stopped resolving.