What Fishbrain Premium actually includes
On their US web page the tier is called Pro and costs US$12.99/month billed monthly, or US$79.99/year — shown as US$6.69/month — after a 3-day free trial. On the Australian App Store the same idea is sold as Fishbrain Premium at A$22.99, with a Power Fishing Package ladder above it at A$19.99–22.99/month, A$69.99/quarter or A$129.99/year. Prices are storefront-specific, so check in-app before you subscribe. Whichever door you come through, it adds:
- Premium catch maps: filter community catch reports by species, water body, and time period. This is the feature with the most genuine value — 20 million anglers 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.
Where these prices come from. The US figures were read on 31 August 2026 off the rendered "Select your plan" selector on fishbrain.com/pro; the Australian figures off the In-App Purchases section of the Fishbrain App Store listing the same day. They have moved: through May 2026 the US tier was US$9.99/month and US$74.99/year, and this page quoted the old monthly price until now. Every figure here, and the date it was checked, lives in the fact ledger behind our Fishbrain vs Fishare comparison — if this page and that one ever disagree, the comparison page is canonical. Prices are storefront-specific; confirm in-app before you subscribe.
The bite forecast problem
BiteTime is the forecast feature Fishbrain markets most heavily in their paid pitch, and their App Store listing now calls it "powered by advanced AI". The name implies a learned model. What is missing is any published account of what it learns from. Historically BiteTime was built on the Solunar framework — a lunar-phase tidal-influence formula developed by John Alden Knight in 1926 — and whether that is still the basis underneath the AI wording is an open question they have never answered in public.
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 20 million anglers generating catch data every day, and 20 million logged catches by their own count — far more raw material for a real bite model than anyone else in this sport, ours included. What they have not done is publish anything about how BiteTime uses it. That is what makes the feature impossible to evaluate: you are asked to pay for a forecast whose method is private and whose accuracy is unstated. Our read is that this is a product sequencing choice rather than a capability gap — the community and social features are what drive subscription revenue, and restructuring the app around a forecast surface would break 20 million anglers' 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: 20 million anglers and 20 million logged catches 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Bite forecast model | BiteTime — marketed as AI-powered; method not published | Free — 27-feature neural net over live conditions |
| Species-specific scoring | One score, different display | Free — separate inshore/offshore heads; 207 profiled species |
| Wind, waves, pressure, AIS | Basic (within app) | Free — wind, waves, isobars and live AIS on one map |
| Tide data | Station-based tides | Free — harmonic model, ~5,000 NOAA/BoM/LINZ stations |
| Ocean currents | Not available | Fishare Pro — surface currents and shear lines |
| SST + fronts | Not available | Fishare Pro — SST field with the warm-cold edges already found |
| Seabed terrain + chart marks | Navionics charts, offline-capable | Fishare Pro — 30 m shaded relief (GBR coast) and official-chart marks (US East Coast first) |
| Habitat heatmap forecast | Not available | Fishare Pro — 7-day SST-derived habitat index with D+1/D+2 forecast, per species |
| 14-day forecast matrix | Not available | Free — across all saved spots |
| Account required | Yes | No — browse free without signup |
| Price | US$12.99/mo or US$79.99/yr, after a 3-day trial | Free forever; Pro US$5.99/mo or US$49.99/yr, 7-day trial, no card |
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 "powered by advanced AI." They have not published what the model is, what it reads, or what it was trained on, so nobody outside the company can say. Historically the feature was built on a Solunar-style formula — a lookup based on lunar phase, tide times and time of day — which is the industry standard precisely because it needs no training data. Whether that is still what runs under the AI wording is a question only Fishbrain can answer, and they have not. Treat an unexplained forecast the way you would an unexplained fish report: interesting, unverifiable.
Premium includes Navionics-powered bathymetric charts for offshore depths and bottom contours, download-capable for offline use. Offline is the genuine benefit there, and Fishare does not replicate it. Fishare's own seabed reading is a different shape: depth contours free for everyone, and on Pro a 30 m shaded-relief terrain layer (Great Barrier Reef coast today) plus chart marks lifted from official charts — spot soundings, buoys, wrecks and hazards, US East Coast first. See the Manly Beach spot page for an example of the 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) reading live conditions — wind, swell, tide stage, barometric pressure and trend, sea-surface temperature, solunar phase and a couple of dozen more features per hour. We publish no corpus size and no accuracy figure: it is decision support, not a guarantee. 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.
Price first: on the Australian App Store the tier is sold as Fishbrain Premium at A$22.99, with a Power Fishing Package ladder above it — A$19.99–22.99 a month, A$69.99 a quarter, or A$129.99 a year (listing read 31 August 2026; confirm in-app before subscribing). The community catch data is also 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 multi-input model over live conditions — 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