What Fishbrain Premium actually includes
At $9.99/month (billed monthly) or around $79.99/year, Fishbrain Premium adds:
- Premium catch maps: filter community catch reports by species, water body, and time period. This is the feature with the most genuine value — 15M users have been logging catches for years, and the location density is real.
- Ad-free experience: removes banner advertising from the feed and spot pages.
- Advanced weather layers: wind, wave height, and water temperature overlays within the app.
- Offline maps: download Navionics-powered bathymetric charts for offline use.
- Unlimited logbook entries: free users hit a cap; Premium removes it.
- BiteTime AI forecast: their name for the bite prediction feature. More on this below.
The bite forecast problem
BiteTime AI is the forecast feature Fishbrain markets most heavily in their Premium pitch. The name implies a learned model. The mechanics are a Solunar table — a lunar-phase tidal-influence formula developed by John Alden Knight in 1926.
What a Solunar table does: it scores fishing conditions based on moon position and phase, sunrise/sunset, and tide times. It says roughly the same thing whether you are chasing snapper at Pittwater or barramundi in the Darwin estuary. Every fishing app that has launched in the last 20 years ships some variant of the same formula.
That is not a criticism specific to Fishbrain — the Solunar table is ubiquitous because it is cheap to compute, defensible, and roughly right. But it does not learn from actual catch data. It does not know that bream at Pittwater fish better on a run-out tide than a run-in. It does not know that mulloway in the Hawkesbury respond to pressure drops in a way snapper do not.
Fishbrain has 15 million users generating catch data every day. They have had $65M in venture capital and eight years to train a model on that data. The BiteTime AI forecast, as of mid-2026, remains a repackaged Solunar score. That gap is not a hardware problem or a data problem — it is a product sequencing choice. The community and social features are what drive subscription revenue; restructuring the app around a forecast surface would break 15 million users' existing habits.
What Fishbrain genuinely does better than anyone
The community moat is real and worth acknowledging clearly.
- Catch density: in popular fishing locations, you can see dozens of verified catch reports per week, filtered by species. No other app comes close on this for AU/US coastal fishing.
- Social feed: if you fish with a group or follow local anglers, the feed is genuinely useful. Real catches, real photos, real locations (approximate — privacy-snapped to a radius).
- Catch logging habit: 15M users means the gamification works. If you want to track your personal fishing history with a polished app and community context, Fishbrain does this well.
- Coverage breadth: global coverage, freshwater and saltwater, with community data in places Fishare does not cover yet.
None of these are forecast features. They are network-effect features. If the community is what you are after, the Premium tier is the only way to unlock the most useful part of the network (filtered catch maps).
Head-to-head: forecast features only
| Feature | Fishbrain Premium | Fishare (free) |
|---|---|---|
| Bite forecast model | Solunar table (lunar/tide) | 27-feature neural net trained on 2.5M catches |
| Species-specific scoring | Same formula, different display | Separate inshore/offshore heads; 1,067 species |
| Wind + wave overlay | Basic (within app) | Wind, waves, SST, SST gradient, isobars, AIS — one map |
| Tide data | Station-based tides | Harmonic model, ~5,000 NOAA/BoM/LINZ stations |
| Ocean currents | Not available | Live current overlay |
| SST + fronts | Not available | MUR SST + gradient layer |
| 14-day forecast matrix | Not available | Across all saved spots |
| Account required | Yes | No — browse free without signup |
| Price | $9.99/month | Free |
This table compares forecast and data features only. Fishbrain Premium's community catch maps and social feed are not included here because Fishare does not have an equivalent — that is a genuine Fishbrain advantage for anglers who want community data.
Who should pay, who should skip
- You want filtered catch maps by location and species — Fishbrain's #1 value prop
- You fish popular AU or US locations with high community catch density
- The social/logging aspect matters — you fish with a group and want to compare sessions
- You are storing years of personal catch history in Fishbrain and want to keep the streak
- Ads in the free app bother you enough to pay to remove them
- You are paying specifically for a better bite forecast — you will not get one
- You want to understand WHY conditions are good or bad, not just "3 stars"
- You fish offshore — the Solunar table is least reliable for pelagic species where SST gradients and current shear dominate
- You fish the same spots repeatedly — a model that learns from local catch data will outperform a generic formula over time
- You do not need the social features and just want the best available forecast
Frequently asked questions
Fishbrain markets BiteTime as "AI-powered." The underlying mechanism is a Solunar-style formula — a lookup table based on lunar phase, tide times, and time of day. It does not use machine learning trained on catch data. This is common across the fishing app market; the Solunar table is the industry standard because it requires no training data and is defensible. As of mid-2026, no major fishing app other than Fishare has published evidence of a trained catch-data model.
Premium includes Navionics-powered bathymetric charts for offshore depths and bottom contours. These are download-capable for offline use. For trip planning over structure, this is a genuine benefit not replicated in Fishare. Fishare's map focuses on weather and oceanographic data layers (SST, currents, wind, AIS) rather than bathymetry — see the Manly Beach spot page for an example of the current live overlay.
Yes — they solve different problems. Fishbrain's strength is the catch log and community; Fishare's strength is the forecast and live oceanographic data. Some anglers use Fishbrain free for logging and Fishare for trip planning. At $0 for Fishare, the only cost is two apps.
Fishare's bite score is a feedforward neural network (27 input features → 32 hidden → 16 hidden → 1 output) trained on 2,534,102 verified catches sourced from external catch databases including NOAA MRIP, calibrated against 281,566 held-out validation samples (val loss 0.0063). Inshore species run this model; offshore pelagics (yellowfin tuna, mahi-mahi, marlin) use a separate head (31→16→8→1) where SST gradients and current shear replace the dawn/dusk prior. See the full Fishbrain vs Fishare comparison for a feature-level breakdown, or try the forecast directly at a spot near you.
For the forecast and live data specifically: Fishare is free with no account required to browse. For pure weather, Windy is free and excellent. For bathymetric charts, Navionics has a free tier with limited offline access. For community catch data specifically, nothing comes close to Fishbrain's network — that is the one feature Fishbrain Premium is genuinely difficult to replace.
The community catch data is thinner in Australia than in the US — the user base skews heavily US. For NSW and QLD coastal species, there is catch data, but density is lower than you will find for Florida or the Great Lakes. If you are in Australia primarily for the forecast and local species coverage, Fishare has broader per-species calibration for AU species (yellowtail kingfish, snapper, mulloway, barramundi) plus live map data that was built specifically for the AU coastline.
Try the forecast — free, no account required
Fishare's bite score is a model trained on 2.5M real catches — not a Solunar table. One map: wind, waves, SST, tide, currents, isobars, live AIS. See how this weekend compares across your spots.
Open Fishare — free