Find the spot
See what’s around you, including the places you’ve never walked into.
The café map app for iPhone
The best café you haven’t tried is four blocks away.
Kava is a free café map app for iPhone. It remembers what every café was really like: the cup, the seat, the noise. And it shows you the ones you haven’t tried.
Free, and yours alone. No public feed, no followers, no one grading your taste. Works in any city, iPhone first, no account needed.
01 / THE PROBLEM
Your usual isn’t your favourite.
It’s just the one you know.
You walk past a dozen cafés to reach the one you’re sure about. It’s fine. It’s also why you’ve never found the place that would have been yours.
Somewhere new is a gamble: a bad cup, no seat, nowhere to plug in, too loud to think. So you don’t risk it. And a stranger’s 4.6 on Google was never going to settle it for you. But a café is only a gamble once.
Rate the cup
And the seat, and the noise. One line about what mattered is enough.
Watch it fill in
Your neighbourhood colours in. Then the one beside it.
02 / MADE FOR EXPLORING
How the café map
finds your next one.
kava
cafés
2%
of Toronto
30 cafés scratched
YOUR PROGRESS
Watch a whole
Watch a whole
city fill in.
Thirty cafés is 2% of the 1,278 on Kava’s Toronto map. That gap is what makes you walk four extra blocks. Give it a year and your neighbourhood is mostly colour, the blank streets are the interesting part, and you have stopped guessing where to go on a Saturday.
A scrapbook for coffee,
a map for what’s next.
Keep the memories. Find your next favourite.
Send me the launch linkCurrently brewing
A few hundred coffees.
Mostly the same place.
That is what the next few months look like without Kava. It is planned for the App Store this autumn: leave your email and we’ll send the link the day it opens.
coffeeholics already waiting
Free, no account needed to start, and we only email you about the launch. Join the Discord before launch and the Pre-release Coffeeholics role is yours to keep. We have shipped 117 updates since July, every one of them public in the release notes.
Kava is made by Farspire Enterprises Inc., a Canadian company. The app runs no analytics, and your photos never leave your phone. You can unsubscribe from any email we send, and our privacy policy sets out what we keep. Questions go to info@mykava.app.
SOON ON THE
App Store
03 / QUESTIONS
Questions about
the café map app.
What is Kava?
Kava is a free, private cafe map app for iPhone, planned for the App Store this autumn. Add every coffee shop you visit, rate the cup, save a note, and build a map of the places you’ve been and the ones you still want to try.
Is Kava related to the kava drink?
No. Kava is a café map app for iPhone, made by Farspire Enterprises Inc., a Canadian company. It has nothing to do with the kava drink made from the kava plant. It is about coffee, and the cafés you have tried.
Is there an app to track coffee shops you’ve been to?
Yes, that is exactly what Kava does. Search a cafe nearby, add it to your map in a couple of taps, and watch your list of visited coffee shops grow across the city. See how it works.
Is Kava free?
Yes. Mapping cafes, your notes, your ratings and your photos are free, and no account is required to start.
kava+ is an optional subscription that adds two things:
- your cafes waiting on your next phone, instead of lost with the old one
- the big chains off the map, so what is left is worth walking to
During the beta it is free with an account. After the App Store launch it will be US$1.99 a month or US$19.99 a year in the US, after a 1-week free trial, and the App Store shows your local price before you buy. Nothing that is free today becomes paid.
What is the difference between Kava and just saving cafes in Google Maps?
Google Maps can save a place. Kava keeps what it was like: the cup, the seat, the noise, in your own words. It also keeps showing the cafes you have not been to, so what you end up with is a map of your own taste rather than a folder of pins.
How do I find a coffee shop near me that I have not tried yet?
Open the map and look for the cafes that are not lit up yet. Kava marks the ones you have already been to, so the blank ones are the suggestions, and they come from the open Overture Maps catalogue, which means nobody is paying to appear there.
Can I write down what I ordered and whether I would sit there again?
Yes. Every cafe takes a rating and a note, so you can record the flat white that was worth the walk, the table by the window, or the reason you would not go back. Your notes stay on your phone unless you turn on kava+ backup, and nobody else can browse them. Here is how we rate one: five scores, not one star.
When is Kava coming to iOS?
Kava is planned for the App Store this autumn. Leave your email and we’ll send the download link the day it opens.
Can anyone else see my reviews?
No. Kava has no public feed, no followers and no way for anyone to browse your map. Your ratings and notes are yours to read, so you can be as truthful as you want about every cup. What we store and why is set out in full in our privacy policy.
Do I have to add every single coffee?
No, and you shouldn’t. Add the cafes worth remembering and skip the petrol-station cup. Adding one takes a couple of taps, which is the whole point. A habit that costs real effort is a habit you drop by March.
Which cities does it work in?
Anywhere. Cafe search and neighbourhood progress work worldwide, because the cafe catalogue comes from Overture Maps, the open map data project hosted by the Linux Foundation. Toronto is simply the city in our examples.
Can I share my coffee map with friends?
Yes. Kava turns your progress into a clean share card showing how much of your city you’ve scratched off. See the share card.
Will there be an Android version of Kava?
iPhone comes first. Join the notify list and you’ll be the first to hear when an Android version is scheduled.