August 16, 2026

Introducing Seated

Know the wait before you go.

You know the feeling. It's 7pm on a Friday, you're hungry, and you're standing outside a restaurant on Main Street doing the math: is that a fifteen-minute wait or an hour? Do we put our name down here, or walk two blocks and try the other place — and risk that one being worse?

You can look up a restaurant's hours. You can look up its menu, its photos, its reviews from 2019. You can find out almost anything about it except the one thing you actually need to know right now: how long until I'm sitting down?

That's the gap Seated fills.

What Seated is

Seated is a live map of restaurant wait times, built by the people standing in them.

Open the app and you'll see the restaurants around you as pins on a map. Each pin is colored by its current wait — green means you'll walk right in, yellow means a short wait, red means grab a drink somewhere else first. One glance tells you where to go.

That's it. That's the whole idea.

The part that makes it work is that the data comes from people, not from a company. Nobody's calling restaurants to ask. There's no hardware in the ceiling counting heads. When you're waiting somewhere, you tap one button and tell everyone else. Takes about three seconds.

How to use it

Check the map. Pins are colored by current wait. Green is instant, yellow is under twenty minutes, orange is twenty to thirty, red is thirty-plus. Grey means nobody's reported yet.

Report your wait. This is the important one. When you get seated somewhere, open Seated, tap the restaurant, and tap your wait — Instant, under 10, 10–20, 20–30, 30–45, or 45+. Optionally add how the parking looked and your party size. Then you're done.

Browse and search. The Explore tab lists everything near you, sorted by distance, shortest wait, or where people are reporting most. Search by name or by cuisine.

Watch the forecast. Once a restaurant collects enough history, Seated starts predicting what the wait probably is right now based on what it's usually like at that hour on that day. Forecasts are always clearly marked as predictions — never dressed up as live data.

Why reporting matters more than checking

Here's the honest part.

Seated only works if people report. A map with no reports is just a map. Every wait time you see came from someone who took three seconds to log it on their way to the table — and every wait time you log saves the next person that same guesswork.

This is why Seated is free, has no ads, and isn't trying to sell you a reservation. There's nothing to monetize in a community telling itself where the wait is. It's just useful.

If you use it, report. That's the whole deal.

The part that makes it effortless

Reporting takes three seconds, but you still have to remember to do it. So Seated handles that too.

If you turn it on, the app notices when you've spent time at a restaurant and asks, right as you're leaving, how long you waited. No opening the app, no remembering later. Just a notification and one tap.

This is the feature the whole thing is built around, and it's why Seated is a real native app — it needs to work when it isn't open.

Two things about that, because they matter:

It's off by default. You turn it on, or it never runs.

It works entirely on your device. Seated does not upload your location history, your movement, or where you've been. The only thing that ever reaches the servers is a wait report you deliberately choose to send. That's not a policy we're promising to follow — it's how it's built.

Starting in Plymouth

Seated is starting in Plymouth, Michigan, because that's home, and because a community wait-time app has to be dense to be useful. Better to be genuinely good in one downtown than empty in fifty.

If you're in Plymouth: download it, and report your waits. Kellogg Park on a Saturday is exactly the problem this is meant to solve.

If you're not: it'll get there. The map grows wherever people start reporting.

Where it's going

Near-term, the list is short and practical. Better forecasts as report history builds. Restaurant owners being able to claim their listing and post official wait times. Notifications when a place you've saved clears out.

Longer-term, the interesting question is what a city looks like when everyone can see its wait times at once. Where the crowds actually are on a Friday night. Which places are quietly never busy at 8pm. That's a map nobody has right now.

But that only exists if the reporting habit exists first. So: one tap, three seconds, on your way to the table.

Know the wait before you go.

Seated is made by Sebastian Mooney in Plymouth, Michigan.