No app for customers · No app for the restaurant · Free forever
Restaurant waitlist with no app to download.
Customers scan a QR code on the door, type their name, and they're in the queue. No App Store. No Play Store. No download friction. Restaurant runs it from any phone or laptop browser too.
Got a queue? Don't make tourists download another app.
Yelp Waitlist asks customers to install Yelp. Waitwhile asks them to install Waitwhile. We ask them to scan a QR. That's it.
Customer side: zero install
Scan QR with the camera app. The phone opens a web page. Type a name. Done. Works on iPhone, Android, dumbphones with QR cameras, anything.
Restaurant side: zero install
The host's admin link is a URL. Open it in Safari, Chrome, whatever's on the till tablet. No signup, no password, no software to update.
No friction for tourists
Visitors who'd never download a one-time-use app for a single brunch will scan a QR. App-install resistance is killing waitlist conversion at every restaurant we've watched.
Works on phones from 2014
Plain HTML form, no fancy framework on the customer side. iPhone 6, Android 5, anything with a browser handles it.
No data harvesting
Apps like to grab your contacts, location, photos. The List can't — it's just a web page. Names auto-delete after 48 hours.
No app updates
Restaurant doesn't have to chase staff to update the iPad app every Tuesday. The web page IS the latest version, always.
Every restaurant waitlist app on the market right now wants customers to install something. Yelp Waitlist works through the Yelp app. Waitwhile pushes its own. NextME has a customer-facing PWA that's a download in disguise. The pitch is always the same: your customers will install our app for the convenience of joining the queue. The reality is: most won't, your conversion drops, and the people who DO install it are leaving you a one-star review the next morning when the app pings them with a marketing notification at 8am.
The List throws all of that out. Customers scan a QR code with their phone camera. The QR opens a web page. They type a name and party size. They're in the queue. There is no app. There never will be an app for customers. The same goes for restaurants — the host's admin dashboard is a web URL. Open it in any browser. No software, no install, no updates, no team accounts.
Why build it this way? Because the customer-app model is hostile to walk-in dining. Walk-ins are by definition spontaneous: someone's wandering down a street, they see your queue is too long, they want to join from the corner with a beer in their hand. A 30-second App Store install kills that conversion every single time. A 2-second QR scan does not.
Free forever for restaurants. The product is funded by ads on our marketing pages and by an optional pay-per-SMS bolt-on for restaurants that want to text customers when their table's ready. The signup screen — the one your customers see — has no ads on it. We won't ever sell your customer data. There's no customer data to sell, because we delete it 48 hours after the queue closes.
Saturday brunch — what the no-app flow looks like
Typical run-of-show
- 1QR code on the door + at the hostess stand.
- 2Customer scans with phone camera — page opens, no install prompt.
- 3Types name and party size, taps Add — back of the queue.
- 4Sees their position update live on the page they're already on.
- 5Hostess sees the live queue in any browser tab.
- 6Table opens, hostess taps Done on the matching party, next up.
But what about push notifications?
Push notifications are the one thing native apps do that browsers don't reliably do across iOS / Android. We've made the call to skip them rather than half-do them, because the workflow we replace doesn't need them — the customer is sitting on the page that auto-refreshes. They see their position go from #5 to #2 to #1 to YOU'RE UP without us pushing anything anywhere.
If you want active notifications, the optional SMS bolt-on does it cleanly: type a phone number on signup, the host taps a button and the customer gets a real text message. SMS works on every phone ever made and bypasses the whole app-permission dance.
The tablet question
If you've shopped restaurant waitlist tools, you've been pitched a dedicated tablet. The pitch is always: "the host needs a fixed device at the stand." The reality is most restaurants put the tablet somewhere safe and use their phone anyway. The List doesn't ship hardware. The host's admin URL works on whatever they already have — phone, tablet, the bar's spare laptop, the laptop in the office.
If you want a dedicated screen at the door for customers to see the queue (a public display rather than a host control panel), open the QR poster page in fullscreen on any old screen. That's free too. We don't have a dashboard tier or a hardware tier or any tier — there's just the one product and it's free.
Questions hosts ask
What's the actual catch? Why isn't this a paid product?+
There isn't a catch on the free side. The product is funded by display ads on marketing pages (the page you're reading now) and by a future optional pay-per-SMS bolt-on for restaurants that want to text customers when their table's ready. Use it free forever without either. We're not VC-funded, we don't have a sales team, and there's no growth-at-all-costs pressure to ratchet up prices later. Built and maintained by a working musician.
How do I get the QR code in front of customers?+
There's a free print-ready QR poster generator at /shop-poster. Tap a button, get a PDF sized for A4 / US Letter / window-sticker dimensions. Print at the local print shop, stick it on your door. The QR is permanent — it stays the same week to week, you don't reprint.
Customers can join from anywhere if they have the URL — is that a problem?+
In practice, no. Customers only get the URL by scanning the QR at your venue. Nobody's going to search the internet for a random restaurant's queue link from home. If a regular bookmarks it and tries to join from down the road, the host can either let them or tap remove. The host has full control of the list either way.
Does it work on iPhones AND Android?+
Yes — it's a web page. iOS Safari, Android Chrome, Samsung Browser, Firefox, anything that can open a website can use it. We test on iOS and Android every release.
What happens to the customer's name and number after the queue closes?+
Names and phone numbers auto-delete 48 hours after the last queue activity. We never persist them, never use them for marketing, never sell them. UK GDPR-friendly by default — most US-built waitlist tools don't have anything similar.
Can I run this for a busy restaurant night with 200 walk-ins?+
Yes. The app is built to handle a single restaurant's busy Saturday — hundreds of names, party sizes, status updates per night. We've tested with synthetic loads of 500 simultaneous queue holders. Real-world busy restaurants are a fraction of that.
Ready in 10 seconds.
Tap the button. Share the QR. That's it.
Running something else?