About this project
Your lake, at a glance.
Water levels, trends, and open boat ramps for the lakes of the American West, free. Plus LakeStats Compass, a depth map of the lakebed drawn at today’s water level that keeps working where the signal doesn’t. On iPhone, Android, and the web.
Free to use. LakeStats Pro adds on-water tools for $39.99 a year.
Screenshots
Dark by design, so it reads at the wheel in full sun and does not wreck your night vision after dark.
LakeStats Compass
Every reservoir drops and fills, and a chart printed last season does not know that. Compass redraws the bottom against the water that is actually there today, so the shallows you see are the shallows you will hit.
It is deliberately not a 3D flyover. At the wheel you need to know where it is deep, where it is shallow, and how close the difference is. Blue is deep, red is where the water runs out, and the boundary moves as the level does. Tap anywhere for the depth there, follow your own position with heading, and read live depth and speed off the top of the screen.
The whole map for a lake downloads before you launch, in tiers from lite to full detail, so it works twenty miles from a cell tower with the phone in airplane mode.
What it does
Everything a boater needs to plan a trip stays free, including the depth map. LakeStats Pro adds the tools you use once you are on the water, and all of it works offline.
Free
LakeStats Pro
Where it came from
Cedar Web Services spent several years building PowellPoint, a location-sharing and navigation app for Lake Powell boaters. In the same waters, LakeStats launched in May 2025 as a simple site that showed the current water level of a few lakes, grew into an iOS app that November, and in June 2026 shipped Compass, a free depth map that quickly caught on in Lake Powell circles.
The two teams reached out to each other, and in July 2026 formed LakeStats LLC. The features PowellPoint had been building became LakeStats Pro in August 2026. Cedar Web Services is a founding partner and leads engineering. Everything that was free before is still free today.
How it was built
Boaters are out of coverage most of the time they need the app, so the architecture starts from that constraint. The web codebase carries the interface, and the pieces that must be fast or must work with no signal are native.
01
The public site, the admin panel, and the mobile app are one React, TypeScript, and Vite codebase. Capacitor wraps it for iOS and Android. Build-time flags gate what ships where, so the web build never carries native-only code and the app never ships the admin panel.
02
A Java Spring Boot service on Google Cloud Run pulls readings from the Bureau of Reclamation’s HydroData and RISE catalogs, USGS gauges, and Salt River Project. Cloud Scheduler triggers it, it polls each source lightly, and it stops asking about a lake as soon as the day’s reading is in. Nothing runs when there is nothing to fetch.
03
Data lives in Supabase: Postgres for lake configuration, readings, spots, reports, and subscriptions, plus Edge Functions for the work that needs a server, like verifying App Store receipts. The platform started on Firebase and is being moved table by table without a user-facing cutover.
04
Compass renders on MapLibre through a custom native plugin rather than in the web view. Bathymetry surveys are processed per lake into tiled depth rasters and served from Cloudflare R2. The app downloads a lake in tiers before launch, then reads GPS, heading, and haptics from the phone directly, so the map keeps working in a canyon with the phone in airplane mode.
05
The lakebed does not change, but the surface does. Compass takes the current elevation from the collector and shades depth against it, so as the lake drops the shallows grow on the map the same way they grow on the water. A slider lets you explore the lake at other levels before a trip.
06
Hazards, conditions, and spots are written to the phone first. Anything created out of range is held locally and sent when the device is back in coverage, so a boater can flag a submerged rock the moment they find it rather than remembering to do it at the dock.
07
Sign in with Google, Apple, or Facebook. LakeStats Pro is an annual subscription billed through the App Store and verified server-side, tied to the account rather than the device, so it restores anywhere the user signs in.
08
Staging and production deploy through GitHub Actions from a single release script that keeps the web and native version numbers in sync. Native builds must boot the exact bundle being archived on a simulator before anything is uploaded to a store, a gate added after a release once shipped without its backend configuration.
Free on iPhone and Android, and the water data is on the website with no account at all.
We build iOS, Android, and web apps that share one codebase, and the backends and data pipelines behind them. Directly for businesses, and as a white-label partner for agencies.
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