Methodology

Ownership, ads and how the site makes money

TablesReady runs this site. TablesReady makes the TablesReady waitlist app, which is one of the 67 products in this catalog, so the site’s owner competes with many of the products it lists. The site sells no listings or placements and takes no money from other vendors; its commercial return comes from the TablesReady ads described below, when a visitor follows one and signs up. Readers should weigh that, and check any fact that matters to a purchase against the source link printed beside it.

TablesReady appears in two ways:

• A regular listing, shown first. On category and alternatives pages other than healthcare, TablesReady’s full listing appears at the top, labeled “Ad · Site owner’s product”, instead of in its alphabetical place. Its starting price, free plan, features and labels are worked out the same way as for any other product.
• Ad cards. These carry the same label and promote TablesReady on the home page, on the virtual queue, restaurant, appointment and retail and public-service category pages, near the top of alternatives pages for products in those categories, and beside the listings of other products in those categories. The healthcare, pre-launch and childcare category pages carry no ad; for healthcare, that is because TablesReady does not sign HIPAA business associate agreements.

Every link from this site to the TablesReady website is marked rel="sponsored". The Visit buttons and ad cards also add campaign tags (UTM parameters) that tell TablesReady a visit came from here. No other vendor pays for a listing, a placement or a position.

Where the facts come from

Descriptions, features and pricing come from each vendor’s own website: the home page, pricing page, feature pages, help documentation, about and terms pages, and changelog. Public data sources add facts that the vendor does not write:

App Store and Google Play reviews, Capterra, G2 and Reddit are read only for recurring review themes. Each theme is summarized in new wording with links to where it appears. Star ratings from review directories are never shown, and no rating markup is added for search engines.

Vendor marketing claims, such as customer counts, awards, rankings or comparisons with competitors, are not shown for any product. A vendor’s SOC 2 or HIPAA business associate agreement claim appears only with a link to the vendor page that makes it, marked “Claimed by vendor”.

Pricing rules

• Source. Prices, free plans and trials come from the vendor’s own pricing page. When a vendor has no pricing page that covers the product, a vendor page that states that product’s price, or plainly says the product is free, is used instead. Prices found only in help articles, terms of service, review sites, directories or news stories are not used. A price shown only inside an image is used once a person has read it on the live page and recorded it with that page’s address. Where no vendor page states a price at all, the directory’s operator may supply the figure, and the listing names the operator as its source.
• Starting price. The lowest paid plan that includes the waitlist or queue feature, not a cheaper plan or module that lacks it. It is recorded in the currency the pricing page shows by default, with no conversion. A bare “$” is read as US dollars unless the page is written for another country.
• Billing period. Where a page offers both monthly and annual billing, the monthly-billed price is used if it appears in the page’s text. If only the annual-billed price can be read, that price is used and the listing’s pricing notes say so.
• No single starting price. Some published prices cannot be reduced to one plan price under these rules: a price with no stated currency or billing period, a fee charged per use instead of a plan, or add-on modules with no base platform rate. No starting price is recorded then. The listing says “See vendor pricing page”, and its pricing notes describe what the page shows.
• Free plan. “Yes” only when the pricing page plainly offers a $0 plan, or plainly states that a free version exists, and that free plan includes the waitlist. A vendor with no pricing page also counts when its own site plainly says the product is free and the free product includes the waitlist. A free plan without the waitlist, a free trial, or free use during a trial does not count. Otherwise the listing says “No free plan listed”.
• Free trial. The number of days the vendor states, or “No free trial listed”.
• Free product without a pricing page. When a vendor has no pricing page but its own site plainly says the product is free, the listing shows it as free, with that page as the source, and not as “Book a demo for pricing”. No price is shown, because none is published. The free product must still include the waitlist; if the vendor’s terms mention paid plans without prices, the listing’s pricing notes say so.
• Book a demo for pricing. This flag marks a vendor that publishes no prices and does not say its product is free. It appears on cards and listings, and category pages can filter by it.
• Contract. Monthly, Annual or Both when the page says so. Any other term, such as quarterly billing, shows as Unknown, with the actual term in the pricing notes.

Each pricing fact is stored with the page address, the quoted text and the date it was read.

The second pricing check

Before a product is published, a separate second check re-reads the live pricing page (or the vendor page that says the product is free) and confirms every pricing and free-plan field against a quoted snippet. A free plan stays “Yes” only if this second read confirms it. When the first and second reads disagree, the more cautious value is kept. A product whose pricing page cannot be read or confirmed, for example because the page blocks automated access, is held back until it can be checked.

Features

The checklist has 24 features: 17 for any waitlist or queue (among them remote joining, QR code check-in, self check-in kiosks, SMS and two-way SMS, wait time estimates, reservations, table management, appointment booking, POS integration, multi-location management, a public API and single sign-on), 4 for pre-launch tools (referral tracking, email broadcasts, embeddable signup forms, referral leaderboards) and 3 for childcare enrollment (online enrollment forms, application fee collection, priority or sibling rules).

Each feature is marked Yes, No or Not recorded. Yes needs a link to a vendor page that shows the feature; help documentation is preferred over marketing pages. A point-of-sale system built into the vendor’s own product counts as POS integration. Not recorded means no source was found either way, not that the feature is missing. Result cards and filters show confirmed features only.

Labels

Each listing shows three labels, each printed with the data points behind it. The rules below run in the order given, and the first one that matches sets the label. The same thresholds apply to every product, TablesReady included. Labels are recalculated whenever the site is rebuilt.

Update activity

The update count is the larger of two numbers: iOS app versions released in the 365 days before the data was collected (from the App Store version history), and entries in the vendor’s public changelog over the last 12 months. An Android app adds no count; it supplies only its last update date. The last update is the most recent date among the iOS app, the Android app and the changelog.

1. Unknown: there is neither an iOS update count nor a changelog count.
2. Low: a count of 2 or fewer.
3. Moderate: a count of 3 to 5; or a count of 6 or more when the last update is more than 90 days old or its date is unknown.
4. Active: a count of 6 or more, with the last update no more than 90 days old.

Market presence

Four inputs feed this label. The Tranco rank of the vendor’s domain. Google Play installs, taken as the lower end of the range Google Play shows, so “100K+” counts as 100,000. Whether the Chrome UX Report has field data for the site. And domain age: the current year minus the year the domain was registered.

1. Established: a Tranco rank from 1 to 200,000; or 100,000 or more Google Play installs; or Chrome UX Report field data together with a domain at least 5 years old.
2. Growing: any Tranco rank (the list stops at 1 million); or Chrome UX Report field data; or 10,000 or more Google Play installs.
3. Unknown: neither rule above matched, and either the traffic-rank lookup failed or the Chrome UX Report lookup failed.
4. Small: neither rule above matched, and both lookups completed.

Buying style

1. Sales-led: no public pricing. These products carry the Book a demo for pricing flag.
2. Self-serve: public pricing and confirmed sign-up without talking to sales. A custom or enterprise plan that goes through sales does not change the label; the listing notes it as a detail (“custom or enterprise plan through sales”).
3. Sales-assisted: public pricing, but self-serve sign-up is not confirmed.

App store ratings

An App Store rating is shown only when it rests on at least 10 ratings. Smaller samples are hidden for every product. For Android apps the listing shows the Google Play install range and last update date.

Descriptions, pros and cons

All text on listings is written for this site from the product data, the collected signals and the research notes. Nothing is copied from vendor sites or review directories. Every pro and con, and every line about who a product suits or does not suit, links to a source page or names the data point behind it. Where research found few recurring review themes, a listing shows few or none; themes are never invented.

Order of lists

Apart from TablesReady’s own entry at the top, labeled as an ad, lists are alphabetical and are not ranked. Category and alternatives pages let visitors filter by pricing and confirmed features, and re-sort by update activity or market presence, but the default order is A to Z. An alternatives page lists the products in the competitor’s first (primary) category, alphabetically, without the competitor itself; a product that shares only a later category with the competitor is not on that page. The home page row of established products is a selection by market presence label, also shown alphabetically.

Vendor icons

Product icons are collected automatically, taking the first one available: the App Store icon of the vendor’s iOS app, then the largest apple-touch-icon or PNG or SVG icon linked from the vendor’s homepage, then the file at /apple-touch-icon.png on the vendor’s site. Icons are resized to 96 by 96 pixels and served from this site. When none is found, a plain letter tile is shown. Icons identify products and belong to their owners.

Update schedule

The catalog is updated monthly. Each update collects the public data sources again and recalculates every label. Each listing shows the date its facts were last checked. Corrections can arrive at any time and are checked against their sources.

Corrections

Vendors and readers can send corrections or new products to listings@waitlistsoftware.com. Include the product name, its website, its pricing page URL and a source for each correction. The submit page lists what to send. Confirmed corrections are published with the next monthly update at the latest.