Genuinely free · No subscription · No card details to start
Free restaurant waitlist app — no monthly fee, ever.
Most "free" waitlist apps mean a freemium tier with feature gates, then a $99–300/mo bill once you grow. The List is genuinely free. No card on file, no monthly fee, no "upgrade for unlimited parties." If you have a queue, you have a tool.
Free forever for restaurants. We mean it.
No card details to sign up. No paid tier looming. No "first 10 parties free, then $89/mo."
No subscription, no card
Tap a button, get a QR. There's no checkout, no trial period, no card-required-to-cancel-later. Use it tonight without giving us anything.
No party-count caps
Run a 200-cover Saturday — every party is free. Run six tables on Tuesday — also free. We don't gate by usage.
No feature gates
Party size, phone capture, drag-to-reorder, randomise, time slots, multi-half events: all in the free tier. There is no other tier.
Funded by ads on marketing pages
Display ads on the page you're reading now (and similar). Never on the customer signup screen. Never inside the host's admin dashboard.
Plus an optional pay-per-SMS bolt-on
If you want to text customers when their table's ready, that's pay-as-you-go SMS via Twilio (rough cost: ~$0.10 per text). Optional. The base product stays free.
No accounts, no signup
Possession of the admin URL is the auth. No email, no password, nothing for us to leak. Lose the URL, start a new event — events expire after 48h anyway.
When you Google "free restaurant waitlist app" you'll find a list of competitors who all use the word "free" in their headline and then put a paywall five clicks deep. Yelp Waitlist is free if you're already paying Yelp for the listing. Waitwhile starts free for tiny lists then jumps to $59–119/mo. NextME is free for the first 5 customers per day, then a quote-on-request enterprise plan. "Free" in this category usually means freemium with feature gates designed to push you to upgrade by week two.
The List is free. Genuinely. No card details to start. No paid tier behind a feature wall. No "first 5 walk-ins free, then $89/mo." Run it for 200 covers tonight, run it for 6 tables on Tuesday, run it forever. If you ever see us add a paid tier for the web app, the original free tier sticks — we'll never bait-and-switch existing users.
The economics work because we run lean. There's no sales team, no enterprise account managers, no growth-at-all-costs investor pressure. The product is built and maintained by a working musician (Aaron) who built it because every open mic he plays is still run on a clipboard. Display ads on marketing pages cover hosting. An optional pay-per-SMS bolt-on (~$0.10/text via Twilio) covers the next round of dev work. That's the whole business model.
If you're a small independent restaurant looking for a waitlist tool that doesn't bleed your already-thin margins, this is built for you. If you're a multi-location chain that wants enterprise features (scheduled reservations, kitchen comms, multi-location analytics, loyalty programs), use Resy or SevenRooms or OpenTable — those are real businesses with the staff to support them, but they're not free, and they're not built for our use case.
Tuesday quiet night, then Saturday brunch — same free tool
Typical run-of-show
- 1Tuesday: open list, get a QR, no walk-ins all night, close. Cost: £0.
- 2Saturday: open the same QR (it's permanent), 90 walk-ins across 4 hours.
- 3Every party scans, queues, gets seated. Cost: £0.
- 4Phones used: the host's, the manager's. Tablets used: zero. Subscription paid: zero.
- 5End of night, close browser. Names auto-delete in 48h.
Why most "free" waitlist apps aren't
The freemium SaaS playbook is straightforward: get a restaurant onto the free tier, watch them grow, hit a usage limit, present an upgrade prompt at the most painful moment (Saturday night, 80 walk-ins deep). Pricing pages call this "flexible scaling." Restaurants call it being held to ransom mid-service.
We refuse to build that funnel. The free tier on The List is the entire product. The optional pay-per-SMS bolt-on is genuinely optional — most restaurants will never use it. The web app stays free even when (if) we eventually launch a native iOS app for hosts who want offline support and saved-night persistence. Web = always free. App = paid one-time with no subscription.
How is this different from a free trial?
A free trial has an end date. The List doesn't. Use it tonight, in two months, in a year — same product, same price (£0). We won't email you to upgrade, we won't suspend your account for inactivity, we won't grandfather you into a worse tier. If you stop using it, nothing happens. Pick it back up whenever.
We also don't ask for a card on signup, which is the silent kill in most free trials — restaurants forget to cancel, get charged the next month, generate a chargeback, end up locked out. None of that happens here because there's no card to charge.
Questions hosts ask
Is there literally no paid tier I'd hit eventually?+
Correct. The web app is free for any number of restaurants, any number of parties, any number of nights. The optional pay-per-SMS bolt-on costs ~$0.10 per text and is only used by restaurants that explicitly opt in. The base product never charges you anything.
Then how do you make money?+
Display ads (AdSense) on marketing pages — the page you're reading, the homepage, vertical landing pages. Never on the customer-facing signup screen. Never inside the host's admin dashboard. Plus the future SMS bolt-on. That's enough to cover hosting + ongoing development.
What stops you from suddenly charging $99/mo next year?+
Nothing legally — we could. Practically, we won't because the entire positioning is "genuinely free" and the moment we paywall the existing free tier we lose the trust that's our only moat against Yelp Waitlist's marketing budget. If we ever do add paid features, they'd be NEW capabilities (multi-location dashboards, priority support, custom branding) layered on top of the free tier. Existing free users keep what they have.
Are there hidden caps — number of parties per day, number of nights per month?+
No. The technical limits are 'whatever a single restaurant's busy night looks like'. We've tested up to 500 simultaneous queue holders. If you somehow exceed that we'll talk, but at that scale you're a chain and Yelp Waitlist is probably a better fit anyway.
Do I have to credit your brand somewhere?+
No. There's no "powered by" stamp on the customer signup page or anywhere else. You don't have to attribute, link to us, or display our logo. Use it like it's yours.
What's the catch on the customer-facing side?+
No catch. Customer signup screen has no ads, no marketing emails, no required app install, no required phone number (phone is optional, only used for table-ready texts). Names auto-delete after 48h. We never market to your customers.
Ready in 10 seconds.
Tap the button. Share the QR. That's it.
Running something else?