Fair questions.

PaddleLens is club and crew management built for paddling clubs. Keep your roster, practices, RSVPs, roll call, attendance, announcements, chat, lineups and dues in one place. Dragon boat and outrigger clubs also get Boat Builder and trials; video coaching is an optional, evidence-qualified tool when you need it.

Yes. Bring the team's roster, squads, practices, RSVPs, roll call, attendance, announcements, chat, lineups and dues into one club workspace. Boat Builder supports DB20 and DB10 crews, Trials records dragon boat results, and optional video coaching is there when a clearly visible paddler and the camera view support it.

Yes. An outrigger canoe or OC club can manage its roster, practices, RSVPs, roll call, attendance, announcements, chat, lineups and dues in PaddleLens. Boat Builder supports OC1 and OC6, Trials records OC1 and OC6 results, and optional video coaching supports clear solo footage or crew footage where one paddler can be isolated.

No. PaddleLens is a web app — open it in Safari or Chrome and it works. If you want it on your home screen, one tap puts it there with its own icon, and it opens full-screen with no browser bars. There's no App Store, no Play Store, no Apple ID, and nothing to update, ever. It does need a signal, though: there's no offline mode yet, so roll call on a river with no bars won't save until you're back in range.

If your phone can open a website from the last few years, yes — iPhone, Android, tablet or laptop, the same app. It's built phone-first: roll call, RSVPs and uploading a clip from your camera roll are all one-handed jobs. There's no minimum OS to check and nothing to install.

These pages and this FAQ are open to anyone. Everything past them — reports, roster, messages, photos — needs an account, because it's someone's training data and somebody's club.

Three ways in, and none of them need a card. Start a club — you become its coach and invite your crew. Start a solo account if you train alone or your club isn't on PaddleLens yet; no invite code, just your email, and we send you a sign-up link. Or, if a coach already sent you an invite link or code, use that to land straight in your club's roster. Starting solo isn't a dead end: when your club does turn up, an invite code moves you across and your reports come with you.

The app is free — clubs, roster, practices, roll call, messaging, badges and the boat builder cost nothing, for everyone, with no subscriptions anywhere. PaddleLens sells two optional add-ons. The first is the AI video analyzer: it runs on one-time credit packs (1 credit = 1 analysis) — $5 for 10, $8.99 for 20, $12.99 for 30, valid for 45 days. That works out from 43¢ each, never more than 50¢. Every pack is personal — it belongs to whoever bought it. You can give credits to your club afterwards, and then its coaches spend them. The second is text messages: a club that wants opted-in cancellations, urgent notices, lineup alerts or coded RSVP questions to arrive as SMS as well as in the app buys text credits, from $7 for 150 texts, and those never expire. Sending announcements and messages inside the app stays free. A club may separately collect its own dues through a connected Stripe account. PaddleLens keeps 1% of each payment for US clubs and 3% for clubs elsewhere; Stripe's processing fee is separate.

Never. A pack is a one-time payment through Stripe, and nothing charges you again unless you buy another one. Credits expire 45 days after purchase, which is the one catch worth knowing before you buy a big pack for a short season.

Its coaches. Every pack is bought personally, and a club only has credits because members gave some to it — that gift pays for the coach to analyze the crew. An analysis always uses your own credits first; a coach falls back to the club's pool for the paddler whose club it is. PaddleLens never asks a member to buy analysis credits; a club may separately post its own dues.

No. Giving credits to a club is permanent: they can't come back to you, move to another club, or be refunded. They keep the expiry date they already had rather than starting a fresh 45 days, and the app asks you to confirm the club and the number before anything moves.

For the widest set of measurements, film side-on from the bank: fifteen to thirty seconds of steady paddling, one paddler filling at least 40% of the frame height, the boat edge in shot and the far shoreline or skyline visible behind them. A fixed camera beats a handheld one. Head-on footage can support cadence and side-to-side observations, but it cannot support forward hinge or fore-aft shaft angle; projected arm angles are approximate from that view.

Software finds the selected paddler and follows visible 2D body points across sampled frames. Those observations become projected video measurements such as arm angles, body lean, stroke rate and rhythm, depending on the camera view and usable evidence. Formula-backed criteria are scored in code against a coach-set range where one exists, otherwise a platform reference where the scorer defines one; unsupported readings are left out or unscored. Only then does a language model turn text — the measurements, your first name and your coach's notes — into plain-language coaching. It never receives your video or any image from it.

It depends on clip length, the detail selected and the queue. You don't have to sit and watch it: the job keeps running if you leave the page, the report is waiting under Reports when you come back, and the app tells you when it lands.

Club management works across paddling clubs. Boat Builder supports DB20, DB10, OC1 and OC6; Trials records kayak, OC1, OC6, DB10 and DB20 results. The analyzer follows one clearly visible paddler at a time in solo or crew footage, not a whole crew's synchronization.

Clear solo footage — including OC1, kayak and surfski — can be analyzed, and crew footage can be analyzed when one paddler can be isolated. The analyzer is currently tuned around solo and crew footage rather than separate craft-specific coaching models. Each report includes only observations the camera view and visibility support; unsupported criteria stay unscored.

Every report shows tracking coverage: the share of sampled frames with a usable paddler track. That is coverage, not an accuracy percentage. A reading can still be approximate or unavailable because of the camera view, a small or obstructed paddler, untrusted joints or too few clear stroke cycles. PaddleLens leaves those criteria unscored and shows annotated frames so you can review the evidence. If the capture is weak, re-film with a fixed camera, the paddler filling the frame and the view required for the measurement you want.

No. PaddleLens estimates projected movement from ordinary 2D phone video; it is not 3D motion capture, a force measurement or a medical assessment. It does not claim true torso rotation, paddle force, blade-water contact or exact anatomical angles from every camera view. Use it as coaching evidence alongside the annotated frames and repeatable filming, not as a diagnosis or a substitute for a qualified coach or clinician.

The video file isn't. It's deleted from our servers as soon as the analysis finishes — usually within minutes — and a daily sweep clears anything left behind by an upload that was never analyzed or that failed partway. What we do keep is the derived data: the measurements, the written report, and up to about 60 small annotated frames per analysis so you can see what was measured. Those frames are images of the paddler, and they're deleted whenever the analysis is.

You and your coach, plus any assistant coaches in your club and your club's administrator. Paddlers never see each other's reports, and there is no leaderboard — badges are counts, not points, and nobody is ranked against anybody. We can access data when we have to — to fix a bug, keep the service secure, or handle billing — and we explain exactly when in the Privacy Policy.

No. Your video never leaves our own server — pose tracking runs there, and the file is deleted afterwards. What goes to Anthropic's Claude API is text: for a report, your first name, the measurements and scores, and your coach's notes; for a crew plan, the roster's names, heights, weights, paddling sides, trial results, scores and notes, so it can seat the boat. Never a video, never an image. Nothing you upload is used to train any model, ours or anyone else's.

Attendance exports as a CSV, a month at a time, and any report saves as a PDF from its own page. You can also delete your account yourself, which takes your reports with it.

Yes. A solo account is free and takes an email address — no invite, no club, no card. You get the same analyzer, the same reports and the same progress tracking as a club paddler; the difference is only that no club pool sits behind your own credits. If your club joins PaddleLens later, you can join it without losing any of your history.

Most clubs are using a group chat and a spreadsheet. Nothing stops you running PaddleLens alongside either for a season and moving over when it's obviously better — there's no contract to be in, and no per-member cost while you decide.

There are 17, in four groups: attendance, scores, trends, and milestones. You earn them by doing the thing — your first report, every measured area above 7.5 in one analysis, three reports in a row where your score climbs, six practices without a miss, and so on. They're free, they can't be bought, and they're keepsakes: once earned, a badge stays yours even if the streak breaks. One, Coach's Pick, is awarded by hand when a coach stars one of your reports.

Paddlers aged 13 and up can have their own account, provided a parent or guardian has given the club written permission first. Under-13 paddlers can't hold an account at all — a coach can keep an athlete profile for them, again only with written guardian permission. Guardians can email us any time to see, correct or delete everything we hold about their child.