How it works
You have thirty seconds. That's all it takes.
Hot Tip is a free web app with one rule: it answers with a single place.6,479 independent spots across 123 San Diego neighborhoods and towns, and no way to buy your way in.
Counted on from the live Hot Tip map. Listings start from OpenStreetMap and are corrected by hand.
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. 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.
Not a wheel.
A random picker spins a list you typed in, and has no idea whether the place it lands on is open.
Hot Tip starts from the other end. It takes every independent place inside the distance you set, drops the ones that are shut right now and the ones that are not what you asked for, puts places you have never checked into ahead of ones you have, and only then picks. You never type a list, and it never sends you to a locked door.
One email, no password.
Hot Tip asks for a first name and an email the first time you open it, and the link it emails you is the whole account. There is no password to make up, forget or reset. The demo on hottip.club works with no account.
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.
It is open. Say what you feel like and see where it sends you.
Free. A first name and an email, and no password.