How it works
You have thirty seconds. That's all it takes.
Hot Tip is a going-out app with one rule: it answers with a single place.1550 independent spots across 18 San Diego neighborhoods, and no way to buy your way in.
Play with it
The four steps
01
Tell it what you feel like
Three taps. What kind of place, roughly what you want to spend, and how far you'll go. No account, no sign-up, nothing to fill in. You can do this standing on a corner with thirty seconds of patience.
Coffee, food, drinks, a shop, a haircut. That's the whole menu.
02
It gives you one place
One. Open right now, close to you, independently owned. It's a database query, not an algorithm learning about you and not a model guessing. Places you have never checked into come first, because the rut is the problem we're solving.
If you don't like it, shuffle. It won't repeat the last three.
03
You go, and you check in
Tap I'm here when you arrive. Your phone confirms you're within about a block, so no one behind the counter has to know what Hot Tip is or do anything at all. The stamp lands. That's the moment.
At places that have joined, there's something small waiting for first-timers.
04
It keeps count for you
Places you've tried, a streak in weeks, and a neighborhood board. The board counts new places tried, never money spent, because the only score worth keeping is how much of your own city you've actually seen.
No reviews. No ratings. No photos of other people's dinner.
Four rules it can't break
These aren't preferences. They're in the query and in the build.
Independent only
No chains, ever. Anything with a corporate parent never enters the pool. The constraint is the product.
Nobody buys the answer
A business that joins gets a small nudge in the ranking, and still has to pass every other filter. There is no paid top slot.
Open now, or not shown
If we can't tell whether a place is open, it stays off the answer. A tip you can't act on tonight isn't a tip.
Free for you, forever
No subscription, no premium tier, no upsell. You are not the thing being sold here.
No account until you want one.
Browsing the map and getting an answer needs nothing at all. An account is only required to check in, and it's one email field with a link in it. No password to make up, no password to forget, nothing to reset.
There's no app store either. Hot Tip runs in a browser tab, and you can add it to your home screen if you want it there. Nothing is locked behind installing.
Be first on the block.
One email the day San Diego opens. Nothing else, ever.