Everything people ask.

Hot Tip is a going-out app for people who already live in San Diego. You say roughly what you feel like in three taps, and it answers with one independently owned place near you that is open right now. It gives you a single answer rather than a list, a feed or a ranking.

Hot Tip is free for people who use it, and it stays free. There is no subscription, no premium tier and no paywall. Businesses may later pay a flat monthly fee to claim their listing, but that never buys them a better answer.

Hot Tip covers 1550 independently owned businesses across 18 San Diego neighborhoods, including East Village, Pacific Beach, Point Loma, North Park, Hillcrest, Little Italy. Each neighborhood has its own page listing what is on the map there.

No. Hot Tip is a web app, so it opens in a browser like any other page. On an iPhone you can add it to your home screen from the Safari share menu, and on Android from the Chrome menu. Nothing is locked behind installing it.

It runs a database query, not a recommendation model. It filters to places that are open at that moment, match the kind of place you asked for, sit inside the distance you chose, and are independently owned. It then weights places you have never checked into far above ones you have, suppresses the last three answers so shuffling feels fresh, and adds a little randomness so two people standing together do not get the same spot.

Because a list is the problem, not the solution. San Diego already has Google Maps and Yelp for browsing everything nearby. Hot Tip exists for the moment when you are bored of your own rotation and want something decided for you.

Yes. Shuffle gives you another, and it will not repeat any of the last three answers. If nothing is open within the distance you picked, Hot Tip says so and offers to widen the search rather than handing you a bad answer.

No. The picker is a SQL query with a few weights, which makes it fast, free to run and predictable. There is no language model between you and the answer.

You already know where the chains are. The whole point is the independently owned place four blocks away that you have been meaning to try for two years. Anything with a corporate parent is filtered out of the pool entirely.

No. A business that claims its listing gets a modest nudge in the ranking, and still has to pass every other filter first. There is no paid top slot and there never will be, because the moment a recommendation can be bought it stops being worth trusting.

No. Hot Tip has no reviews, no star ratings and no photos of businesses. What it shows is the place, the kind of place, whether it is open, and one human line about who runs it when we have one.

You tap I'm here when you arrive and your phone confirms you are within about a block of the place. Nobody behind the counter has to do anything, know what Hot Tip is, or scan anything. A stamp lands on the card and the visit is recorded.

Only to check in. Browsing the map and getting an answer needs no account at all. When you do sign up it is one email field and a link, with no password to invent or reset.

New places tried, never money spent. The board is per neighborhood, so you are compared with people walking the same blocks as you rather than the whole city.

You are probably on it already. The map was built from public data and checked by hand, so most independently owned businesses in the covered neighborhoods are listed without ever being asked. Join the business list and you will hear when claiming opens.

First-time visitors, one at a time, sent by something that is not an ad. Claiming lets you fix your details, write the one human line about who you are, and put something small on the table for people walking in for the first time. There is no commission, no hardware and no app for your staff.

Diego Lujan Studio in San Diego. It is one person building it on weekends, which is exactly why it does one thing.

OpenStreetMap, filtered and checked by hand. OpenStreetMap's licence allows storing and republishing the data with attribution, which is why the credit appears in the app and on this site. Nothing is scraped from Google or Yelp.