What it is

Green Caddie shows the slope, contours and likely break of putting greens at New Zealand golf courses. Pick your course and hole, tap where your ball is and where the hole is, and it gives you the read in cup widths. It runs in a phone browser, needs no account and costs nothing. Once you have opened a course it keeps working with no signal, which matters because golf courses rarely have any.

Coverage

233

courses

3,813

greens

15

regions

Every golf course in New Zealand with LiDAR coverage, Kaitaia to Invercargill. 14 named courses have no LiDAR at all — mostly inland Otago — and they are left out rather than guessed at.

Where the numbers come from

Every height and slope is built from Land Information New Zealand’s 1 m LiDAR elevation survey, published openly under CC BY 4.0. Green outlines and hole numbers come from OpenStreetMap under the Open Database Licence.

What it does not claim

Slope is measured. Break is modelled — the read is a physics simulation of a ball rolling over the measured surface at the green speed you set. It knows nothing about grain, moisture, or which way the mower went this morning.

The survey was flown in 2024, so a green rebuilt since then is out of date. And under Rule 4.3a and Model Local Rule G-11, detailed green-reading material is restricted in competition — Green Caddie is for social and practice rounds, and says so inside the app.

Who makes it

Green Caddie is built and maintained by Alex Leung, a golf enthusiast who initially built the app to help his children learn how to read the green on a golf course. It is a trading name, not a company — which is to say there is one identifiable person behind it, and you can write to him at [email protected].

Advertising

Green Caddie is free and stays free. It is paid for by a small number of New Zealand golf businesses, and it is better to say so plainly than to be mysteriously free.

How advertising works here is a commitment, not just a description of today:

• One placement, on the course list, above the search.
• Never on a green. Nothing comes between a golfer and their read.
• Nothing that interrupts — no pop-ups, no expanding units, no video that plays by itself, nothing that follows you around.
• No personal profiles. Usage is counted anonymously so there are real numbers to quote; nobody is identified or tracked between apps.

The pitch is precision rather than reach: this is a small, specific audience of New Zealand golfers, reachable at the moment they are thinking about a particular course. If you sell to them and that sounds like the right room, write to [email protected].

For clubs

Your course is almost certainly already in here, and it costs you nothing. If something is wrong — a green missing, a hole numbered oddly, a course rebuilt since 2024 — that is worth an email, because the people who can tell are the people who play there.