For guides, captains and lodges
Your clients are already posting. Put your name on it.
Caudal turns a client’s catch into a Caudal Card — a clean, share-ready image with the species, length and weight on it. When your credit is active, it also reads Guided by your business, with your handle and website.
They post it because it’s a good picture of their fish. Your name travels with it.
Free on iPhone and Android. No subscription and no guide tier — there is nothing to buy.
Why it works
You already reach the people who know you.
When you post your own catches, they go to your own followers — people who have already found you. The people worth reaching are your clients’ friends: they fish, they’re looking at a great day on the water posted by someone they trust, and they have no idea who ran the boat.
A guide credit puts your name in front of exactly that audience, which is the one group you cannot buy access to. Your clients do the posting, because they were going to post the photo anyway.
Setting it up
Your client types nothing.
No codes to read out, no spelling your business name over the sound of an outboard, no form to fill in on a boat.
- 1
Fill in your details once
In the app under Profile → Guide / captain / lodge: your business name, Instagram handle and website. You do this a single time.
- 2
Get your code
Tap “Share your credit with clients” and you get three things: a QR code to show on your phone, a printable version of it for a boat sticker or the back of a business card, and a plain link for your Instagram bio or a trip confirmation email.
- 3
They scan or tap it
They point a camera at the QR code, or tap the link. One tap to confirm, and every catch they share for the next week reads “Guided by” your business. They install nothing beyond the free app and hand over no information.
What it does and doesn’t do
The parts worth being straight about.
The credit lasts seven days
Long enough for a day charter, a weekend, or a multi-day lodge stay — then it clears itself. You get credited for the trip you actually ran, and a one-off client is never left with a stale caption they don’t know how to remove.
You receive nothing about the client
No photos, no catches, no location, no email address, no access to their account. The link only puts your name on cards they choose to share. Nothing travels back to you.
There are no analytics
You can’t see how many people scanned your QR code or how many cards carried your name. Caudal doesn’t track it, so we can’t show it to you.
Taking the photo yourself
Measuring your clients’ fish.
Most guides end up holding the camera. That already works today — add each client under Profile → Other anglers and measure their fish on your own phone.
iPhone Pro
With LiDAR you can measure anyone’s fish immediately.
iPhone 12 Pro and later measure using the LiDAR depth sensor and need no hand calibration at all. No setup with the client, nothing to do before the first fish comes over the gunwale.
On Android and non-Pro iPhones, it has to be their hand — not yours.
Without LiDAR, Caudal measures the fish against the hand holding it. If a client holds the fish and Caudal is using your calibration, the length comes out wrong. Calibrate each client’s hand under Profile → Other anglers, or hold the fish yourself.
Three things to do
Get the app, set up your credit, hand out the code.
It takes a few minutes once, and then it runs itself for every client you take out.
Caudal is free, on iPhone and Android.