Tidy Surf

Tidy Surf
Business Snapshot
Tidy Surf is an AI-coordinated lineup management system. Think traffic lights for ocean waves. Surfers wear a mandatory visible ID and a simple wearable prompt layer allocates priority and spacing in real time. The practical effect is lower conflict, safer lineups and higher throughput at crowded breaks.
The Policy Lever
The key economic lever is policy. When a municipality makes wearables mandatory in designated zones, adoption stops being a "maybe" and becomes a public-infrastructure behavior, similar to public transport ticketing. That turns the system from a niche app into a regulated access layer that municipalities can justify because it improves safety, reduces complaints, and increases tourism capacity.
How to interpret this concept in business terms
A municipal access system for a scarce resource
Waves are limited capacity. The wearable requirement converts the lineup into a managed resource with rule clarity, booking, and measurable throughput.
A powerful tourism-and-safety revenue primitive
Municipalities gain a lever that can increase surf satisfaction and reduce aggressive competition, which can expand the addressable audience. That is tourism money. It is also a safety product.
A subscription utility, not a "nice-to-have" app
At scale, this is more like a ski pass or transit pass than a casual subscription. Surfing already has recurring costs (fuel, parking, boards, wetsuits, repairs, lessons, travel, café spend). A $50/month pass is small relative to the total cost of being an active surfer in busy destinations.
Monetization model
01
Surfer subscription (primary)
$50/month per active user
Includes eligibility, wearable-linked priority prompts, booking windows, safety alerts, and identity verification.
02
Municipal licensing + revenue share (secondary)
Municipality pays for enforcement tooling, safety dashboards, and policy integration.
Municipality can take a share or earmark proceeds as a "surf management fee."
03
Hardware and compliance kits (initial + replacement)
Wearable tags, ID markers, standardized compliance gear for visitors
Replacement fees and upgrade cycles
04
Peak-window pricing (optional)
Time-of-day pricing for the most congested windows, similar to congestion charges or peak transit passes
Concrete estimates with mandatory municipal adoption
Define a realistic "regulated surf zone"
A regulated zone is not "one wave." It is usually a cluster of breaks along a coastline corridor where enforcement is plausible and the tourism impact is measurable. Santa Cruz offers a hard anchor: 783,000 surf visits/year across 31 breaks, which is about 2,100+ visits/day across that zone on average.
Assumption set for a Santa Cruz-class zone
Active monthly unique surfers: 20,000 (Visitors rotate. Locals repeat. This is consistent with zones seeing thousands of visits per day.)
Mandatory policy conversion to paid subscribers: 35% in Year 1 (Mandatory requirement accelerates adoption because opting out means no access.)
Subscribers: 7,000
Subscription price: $50/month
Subscription revenue: 7,000 × $50 = $350,000/month
Annual: $4.2M/year
Revenue Estimates
Add municipal license (conservative for enforcement + dashboards):
$50,000/month municipal contract
Annual: $600,000/year
Add visitor compliance kits (daily/weekly visitors):
1,500 visitor kits/month × $25 average = $37,500/month
Annual: $450,000/year
Total conservative zone revenue:
$350,000 + $50,000 + $37,500 = $437,500/month
Annual: ~$5.25M/year
That is one coastal cluster.
Global scaling with "mandatory zones" as the rollout strategy
Anchor from tracked supply: Surf-Forecast covers 7,000+ surf spots globally. A practical target is not all spots. It is the high-traffic corridors where municipalities face complaints and congestion.
Conservative structural assumption:
200 regulated zones worldwide (not 7,000 spots. Zones. Think Bali corridors, SoCal corridors, Gold Coast corridors, major Portuguese/Spanish zones, Hawaii corridors, etc.)
Average zone revenue (conservative blend of big and medium): $2.0M/year
$400M
Annual revenue potential
200 zones × $2.0M/year = $400M/year revenue potential.
$100M
Early years projection
Even if only 50 zones adopt in early years: 50 × $2.0M = $100M/year
Why municipalities adopt
Mandatory wearable policy is rational when it increases:
Tourism satisfaction
Tourism satisfaction and repeat visits
Safety outcomes
Safety outcomes (fewer collisions and confrontations)
Predictability
Predictability (booking windows reduce peak chaos)
Local legitimacy
Local legitimacy 
(clear rules reduce "localism vs visitor" conflict)
It also creates a new municipal revenue line tied to a valuable natural resource, similar in spirit to transit passes, park permits, or congestion charges.
Why this is an instantly legible AI use case
Many AI narratives are abstract. This one is visible the first day it runs. The protocol is simple: identity, eligibility, and turn signaling via wearables in plain language. It is explicitly designed to work like traffic control rather than etiquette debates.
If you want, I can write a second page titled "Municipality Pitch Version" that reads like a procurement memo: safety outcomes, tourism upside, enforcement model, and how to roll it out at three pilot breaks in one region.
Summary
Tidy Surf monetizes a scarcity problem that already causes friction, safety issues, and drop-off. The proposition replaces informal conflict with a predictable system, then sells that predictability to three payers at once: users, destinations, and partners. The value becomes visible immediately in the water, which is rare for AI products
Tidy Surf is traffic management for surf lineups. When municipalities mandate wearable-based access in designated high-traffic zones, adoption becomes infrastructure-grade, similar to public transport ticketing. A $50/month subscription is modest relative to the recurring cost of active surfing (parking, fuel, gear, repairs, travel). Mandatory zones convert chaos into capacity, improving safety and satisfaction while increasing tourism throughput. In a Santa Cruz-class corridor with thousands of surf visits per day, even conservative conversion can produce multi-million annual revenues per zone, then scale across dozens to hundreds of global corridors.