Groundhopper
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A record of the football you actually went to
What we build, what we deliberately do not build, how we make money, and where this is going. In plain English, without the mission-statement voice.
Why it exists
Most supporters have the same problem and solve it the same bad way. You have been to a few hundred matches over twenty years, and the record of them is a shoebox of ticket stubs, a phone full of photos with no dates attached, and a memory that is starting to argue with itself about whether that was 2011 or 2012.
The spreadsheet works until it does not. It survives one laptop, maybe two. It does not draw anything, it does not add up the kilometres, and nobody has ever shown one to a friend.
Groundhopper exists because that record is worth keeping properly. Not as a list — as something you can look at.
What it actually does
You add a match: who played, where, and when. From that it works out the distance from your home city, puts the ground on a map, joins it to everywhere else you have been, and counts what there is to count — grounds, countries, kilometres, seasons, the away days against the home ones.
Then it gets out of the way. There is no feed, no streak to keep up, no notification asking why you have not opened the app. A record of your football should be there when you want it and quiet when you do not.
| What we build for | What we deliberately do not build |
|---|---|
| Keeping a permanent, accurate record | A social network with followers and likes |
| Making that record worth looking at | Live scores — a dozen apps do that better |
| Helping you plan the next away day | Ticket resale, betting, anything adjacent to either |
| Something you can show off if you want to | Anything that makes the app feel like a job |
How we treat you and your data
There is no cookie banner on this site. That is not an oversight — it is the whole point. We host our own fonts and our own map libraries, so no third party learns that you visited. We do not use an analytics provider; the handful of numbers we keep never leave our own server, are tied to a random session identifier rather than to you, and are deleted after thirteen months.
Your profile is private by default. You choose whether to make it public, and you can switch it back. You can export everything you have logged at any time, on any plan, and you can delete your account and every trace of it yourself, from Settings, without writing to anyone.
The details are written out plainly in our privacy policy and terms, in the same English as the rest of the site.
How we make money, in one paragraph
Two things here cost real money every time they run. A poster exported at A1 and roughly 300 dpi is a browser running on a server, drawing your map at thirteen times normal scale. The AI features — reading a ticket photo, working out which ground a club plays at, planning a trip — are paid API calls. That is where the line between Free and Premium sits, and it is not a line drawn to make the free version annoying.
No advertising. No selling data. No affiliate links dressed up as recommendations. If we ever carry anything commercial, it will say so on the page it appears on.
Where this is going
Honestly: the record itself comes first, and everything else is second. The direction we are working in, in roughly this order:
- Making the year visible. A football calendar that looks forward — what you have planned, what you have not, and the weeks with nothing in them.
- Closing the loop. If you planned a trip and the date has passed, the app should ask whether you went, instead of quietly losing the match.
- The Academy. Guides on grounds, away days and host cities, written to be useful rather than to rank — and kept accurate after publication, which is the part most sites skip.
- Making it worth sharing. A profile and a card that look like something you would actually post, rather than a bare link.
We are deliberately not promising dates. A roadmap with dates on it is a list of apologies waiting to happen, and you would be right to hold us to it.
Who is behind it
Groundhopper is a small independent project, not a venture-funded startup with a growth target. That has consequences worth knowing about: things ship slowly and carefully, there is no support department behind a ticketing system, and the person reading your email is the person who can change the code.
It also means nobody upstream is asking us to add advertising, sell data or invent a reason for you to open the app every day.
If something is wrong
Tell us. A wrong stadium, a distance that makes no sense, a guide with an out-of-date ticket price — those are bugs, and we would rather hear about them than have you quietly stop trusting the numbers. Contact details are at the bottom of the terms.