Outdoorithm for Developers
Campground data, enriched.
Search, community safety, satisfaction grades, review sentiment, live availability, and gear for 10,600+ US campgrounds — over a REST API, an MCP server, and webhooks.
Months to scrape. Years to enrich.
Reliably pulling availability from 44 reservation systems is months of dedicated engineering on its own, and it only gets you raw listings. On top of that we've built years of community-safety classification, satisfaction grading, and sentiment analysis no reservation system exposes. Build on both without building either.
Community safety (Greenbook)
Per-campground welcomeness scores and discrimination flags, classified from real reviews. Data no reservation system exposes.
Report Card grades
A–F satisfaction grades per campground and per driver (scenery, facilities, noise, value…), graded against the national distribution.
Review sentiment
Aggregated sentiment, trend direction, and our own generated summaries — never verbatim third-party review text.
Gear intelligence
A curated gear catalog with per-campground recommendations matched to terrain, activities, and amenity gaps.
Terrain & scenery
Geographic terrain classification (mountain, forest, coastal, desert…) derived from coordinates and review signal.
Availability + alerts
Live and cached campsite availability across 44 reservation systems, plus webhook notifications the moment a site opens.
Two ways to build
REST API
A versioned JSON API for apps, websites, and internal tools. API-key auth, cursor pagination, RFC 9457 errors, idempotent writes, and an OpenAPI 3.1 spec.
MCP server
A hosted Model Context Protocol server so AI agents can query campgrounds, availability, safety, weather, and gear as tools — no scraping, no glue code.
claude mcp add --transport http outdoorithm https://mcp.outdoorithm.com/mcpWhat's in the API
- CampgroundsSearch with 20+ filters; ~90-field enriched profiles.
- SafetyGreenbook flag status, vibe score, tone & staff breakdown, alerts.
- GradeOverall + per-driver report-card grades.
- ReviewsSentiment, our summaries, per-dimension signal counts.
- AvailabilityLive/cached availability for a date range.
- GearCatalog search + per-campground recommendations.
- AlertsCreate & manage availability alerts (idempotent writes).
- WebhooksSigned availability.found events to your endpoint.
Your first call
Create a key, then make a request. Every response is versioned JSON under /api/v1.
curl https://outdoorithm.com/api/v1/campgrounds?state=CA&limit=3 \
-H "Authorization: Bearer oai_your_key_here"Access & pricing
Personal use comes with an Outdoorithm subscription. Building a product on our data is a commercial licence.
Personal
Automating your own camping
Included with a subscription
From $39/year. The full API scoped to your own account, plus a monthly usage allowance sized well above ordinary personal use.
See membershipAI assistants
Claude, ChatGPT, and agent frameworks
Free
Our MCP connector exposes campground search, safety, weather and gear with no account required. Fair-use limits apply.
Connector endpointCommercial licences
Month-to-month for the first three months, then annual. No setup fee. Each step up adds data that costs materially more to serve: live availability is fetched from operator systems on demand, so it is priced separately from our own catalogue.
Developer
$99/mo
Catalogue data for one product, on a card, no contract. The entry point to Catalog.
10,000 monthly usage credits
Catalog
$1,000/mo
Campground and gear data for the licensed provider set. No live availability, no alerts.
100,000 monthly usage credits
Availability
$2,500/mo
Everything in Catalog plus live campsite availability across licensed providers.
2,000,000 monthly usage credits
Platform
$3,500/mo
Everything in Availability, plus signed webhooks, multi-tenant end users, and 500 standard-band watches with their own polling budget.
2,000,000 monthly usage credits
Hosted alerts
We run the monitoring and send you a signed webhook when a site opens. You keep your own users, delivery, and history — we never see your users' contact details. You buy a tier: a contracted ceiling on simultaneously active watches, billed flat.
| Active watches | Per month |
|---|---|
| Up to 250 | $400 |
| Up to 500 | $700 |
| Up to 1,000 | $1,100 |
| Up to 2,500 | $1,850 |
Those tiers cover every provider with a usable public API, which is most of what we monitor. A handful of systems carry a real recurring bill to reach, and those watches are billed on top:
| Band | Providers | Cadence | Added per watch / mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | Providers with a usable public API — Recreation.gov, ReserveCalifornia, and most state-park systems. | every 2 minutes | Included |
| Premium | Systems without a usable public API — ReserveAmerica, GoingToCamp, Michigan, Colorado State Parks. | every 30 minutes to 4 hours | + $6 |
| Specialist | The hardest systems we support — San Mateo and Sonoma County Parks, and Idaho and Alabama State Parks (both reached through Itinio). | every 8 hours | + $12 |
A tier is a flat monthly fee for a contracted ceiling. You are billed the tier whether you run one watch or all of them. Only Premium and Specialist surcharges accrue per active watch, prorated daily; paused and expired alerts do not accrue. Breadth inside an alert — up to 10 campgrounds on one provider — does not change the price, because a single poll covers the whole alert.
Moving between tiers. Moving up is prorated and takes effect immediately. Moving down applies at the start of your next period.
Polling is not billed twice. A running watch draws credits from the same meter as your API calls, so you see all spend in one place. Those credits are capacity protection, not an invoice line — polling never triggers an overage charge. Overage applies to API requests you make.
Hosted alert volume is capacity-managed rather than self-serve. There is no tier above 2,500 concurrent watches because that is what we can carry for one partner today. If you are planning for more, talk to us before you build and we will tell you plainly where we are.
Usage is measured in credits, not raw calls. A campground lookup is one credit. A live availability check against an operator that requires a proxy or a browser session costs more, because it costs us more. Every response tells you what it spent, so you can reconcile it yourself.
Going over does not break your product — on a contract. On Catalog, Availability and Platform, exceeding your monthly credits does not fail your users' requests: we keep serving and bill the difference at your contracted rate, and responses tell you the moment that starts. Requests only stop at an agreed overage ceiling.
Developer stops instead. Self-serve has no contracted overage rate and no signature agreeing to one, so at 10,000 credits requests return quota_exceeded rather than quietly billing you for something you never agreed to. Move to Catalog when you need more.
Licences are scoped to providers. You license the reservation systems you need — all of them, or just the state-park systems, or a single operator.
Attribution required. "Powered by Outdoorithm" with a link must appear wherever our data is shown, and chat or voice answers must name Outdoorithm as the source.
One set of terms. Every key, licence, and MCP connection is governed by the Data Use and API Terms: what is free, what needs a licence, how long you may cache, and what happens when a licence ends. A written licence adds the commercial terms on top; it does not replace them.
How to start. Email us with what you are building, the providers or states you need, and rough monthly volume. We will scope a licence with you and can usually get a pilot running quickly. Full endpoint reference is at /docs/api.
Volumes beyond these tiers, or availability alerts on behalf of your own users, are quoted individually — talk to us.
Start building with Outdoorithm data
Grab a key to evaluate, or talk to us about a commercial license. Creating a key accepts the Data Use and API Terms.