One location · Indie · Owner-run · Free
A waitlist app built for small restaurants.
Yelp Waitlist, Waitwhile, NextME all price for chains. Free tiers locked, real plans starting at $89–299/mo, multi-location dashboards you'll never use. The List is the opposite — built specifically for indie single-location restaurants who just need the queue to work.
Small restaurants don't need enterprise SaaS pricing.
30 covers and a clipboard. We're replacing the clipboard, not selling you a multi-location loyalty platform.
One location, full focus
Built for restaurants with one front door, one host, one bar. No "location selector" UI eating screen space, no multi-location syncing logic, no chain-only features.
Owner-friendly pricing
£0/month. £0/year. Forever. The cost of trying it on a Tuesday night is a print-out of a free QR poster.
Setup in under 5 minutes
Tap a button, get a QR. Print the poster. Stick it on the door. The host opens the admin URL on their phone. That's the entire setup.
Owner runs it themselves
No "contact sales for onboarding" call. No account manager. No quarterly business review meeting. Read the free FAQ, you're trained.
Replaces the clipboard, not the POS
Narrow scope by design. Reservations? Use Resy. Loyalty? Use Square. Reviews? Use whatever. The List does walk-in queueing only.
Privacy-friendly out of the box
48h auto-delete. UK GDPR friendly. Works fine for US restaurants too — we just took the privacy default seriously.
Walk into a 30-cover walk-in restaurant on a Friday night and you'll see the same scene play out in different countries: a paper sign-up sheet next to the host stand, names crossed out and rewritten as parties get seated, the host losing track when a 6-top suddenly opens and they have to scan back through the list to find the next party of 6. It's a clipboard. It works. Until it doesn't.
Most waitlist apps are pitched at restaurants several sizes up — chains with 5+ locations, marketing departments, IT support, and four-figure monthly software budgets. The pricing reflects that: tablet hardware up front, $89-299/mo for the SaaS layer, a sales call before you can even see the dashboard. None of that fits a small independent restaurant. The clipboard wins by default because the alternative is overkill.
The List is built specifically for the small end of the market. Single-location restaurants with one host, one front door, one bar, one queue. The scope is narrow on purpose: walk-in queue management. Not reservations, not loyalty, not kitchen comms, not multi-location analytics, not customer marketing. Those are real problems that real tools solve, but they're not what's stopping a 30-cover indie restaurant from running a smoother Saturday night. The clipboard is.
Free forever for small restaurants. The economics work because we're not trying to scale a sales team or service enterprise contracts — the product runs itself, hosting costs are minimal, and the optional pay-per-SMS bolt-on covers ongoing development. If you're a small independent restaurant tired of being marketed to like you're a 50-location chain, this is built for you. Use it tonight, no card required.
30-cover indie restaurant, owner-run, Saturday brunch
Typical run-of-show
- 1Owner prints free QR poster on Friday afternoon (5 min at the print shop).
- 2Saturday morning: host opens admin URL on their phone before doors open.
- 3Customers arrive, scan QR, join the queue from their own phones.
- 4Host taps Done as parties are seated — queue advances live.
- 5Quiet patches: queue empty, dashboard idle, no monthly fee accumulating.
- 6End of service: close browser tab. Total spend: £0.
Why "small" is a positioning, not a limit
There's a tendency in SaaS to treat "small business" as the entry-level tier of the same product designed for enterprise — same UI, fewer seats, less storage. The Notion-for-startups approach. The List is the opposite: built ground-up for single-location independents, with the multi-location features genuinely absent (not gated behind a paid tier). That's a deliberate scope choice. If you're a 5-location chain, this isn't the right tool.
Practically that means: no location selector eating screen real estate, no "choose which restaurant" prompt every time you open the dashboard, no multi-location reporting we have to maintain. The whole product surface is what you'd want for one restaurant.
What we deliberately don't build
Reservations: out of scope. If you take bookings, use Resy or OpenTable for that — they're real systems with proper coverage. The List handles only the walk-in queue, which can sit alongside your reservation system without interfering.
Loyalty programs: out of scope. Use Square Loyalty, Toast, or Mailchimp. We delete customer data after 48h on purpose — there's no customer history to build loyalty against.
Multi-location dashboards: out of scope. The product wouldn't be free if we tried to support multi-tenant operations at the same scope.
Kitchen comms / table management: out of scope. Use whatever your POS already provides.
Questions hosts ask
Define "small" — at what point is The List the wrong tool?+
Rough heuristic: one front door, one host position, one queue. If you have 2+ locations and want to see them in one dashboard, you need a multi-location product (Yelp Waitlist, Waitwhile). If you're 50+ covers with three hostesses managing three sub-queues, the simplicity becomes a liability. Anywhere from 6 covers to 80 covers with one queue is the sweet spot.
Can I run two locations using two separate URLs?+
Technically yes — each location runs The List as its own standalone event with its own QR. Practically you lose the cross-location reporting. If that's enough for you, great. If you need consolidated reporting, choose a multi-location SaaS instead.
How long does it take to train new staff on The List?+
Real number: about 2 minutes. The dashboard is one screen — list of parties, party size, tap Done when seated, drag to reorder. Anyone who's used a phone in the last decade can run it. Compare to NextME's onboarding videos.
What happens during a power outage or wifi drop?+
If wifi drops, the host can't update the dashboard, but the queue state on the server is fine — when wifi comes back, the dashboard catches up. For full power outages, fall back to the clipboard for that night and resume next service. The List is a tool, not a critical piece of infrastructure.
Is the data safe? Where's it stored?+
Stored in Redis (Vercel infrastructure) with 48h sliding TTL. After 48h of inactivity, all customer names + phone numbers are auto-deleted. Server is in EU regions for UK / EU restaurants by default. We never share data with third parties.
What if I want a paid version with more features later?+
We'll likely launch a native iOS / Android app for hosts who want offline support and saved-night persistence — that'll be a one-time paid app on the App Store, no subscription. The web version stays free forever, with all current features. We won't bait-and-switch existing free users.
Ready in 10 seconds.
Tap the button. Share the QR. That's it.
Running something else?