How Booth works

Last updated 19 August 2026

Booth is a free web app for deciding where a group goes out. You start a plan, drop its link in the chat, and everyone suggests, approves, and vetoes real places until the night is decided.

What is Booth?

Booth is a free web app that gives one night out its own room. Instead of a decision scrolling away inside a group chat, the plan gets a page: the place suggestions sit in one list, every person’s dietary needs sit at the top of it, and the votes stay attached to the places they belong to. Everyone reaches it by tapping one link. There is nothing to install and nothing to pay.

It is built for a specific situation rather than for meetings in general: three to eight friends picking dinner or drinks, usually on a phone, usually one-handed, often across enough time zones that nobody is reading at the same moment. People drop in, weigh in on a few places, and leave. The room has to still make sense when they come back, so it is written to be re-entered rather than re-read.

How do you start a plan?

You sign in, then fill in three fields: what the night is called, roughly where it is, and — if you know it — when. That is the whole form. You can also write a free-text brief for Nomi (“somewhere quiet enough to talk”, “walking distance from the station”) and turn the veto off if your group would rather only vote yes.

Booth has no anonymous participation, so a sign-in comes first for everyone, including you. It exists to put a name and a set of dietary tags next to each vote: a room where three people have approved a place is only useful if you can tell which three.

How does everyone else join?

You drop the plan’s link into whatever chat the group already uses. That link is the entire invitation — there is no invite list to fill in, no email to send, and nobody has to be a Booth user beforehand. Tapping it shows a preview of the plan and the option to join it.

Anyone holding the link can join, which is deliberate: it is the same trust model as the group chat you pasted it into. That also means the link is worth treating like the room key it is. Booth keeps plan pages out of search engines entirely so a room can only ever be reached by someone who was given the address.

How does a group choose a place?

Anyone in the room can search for real places and put them forward — the results are actual restaurants and bars with their prices, ratings and distance from the plan’s area, not free-text guesses. Once a place is on the table, the group votes on it two ways.

Approving is unlimited: you can approve as many places as genuinely work for you, which is what stops a group from splitting three ways across five options and deciding nothing. Vetoing costs something on purpose — it requires a written reason, and it is signed. “Too far from the station for me” attached to a name is an argument the group can answer; an anonymous downvote is just a number that makes the room quieter.

What does Nomi do?

Nomi is Booth’s AI participant, and she is in the room rather than beside it: she posts into the same message stream as everyone else, can put places forward herself, and can be addressed directly. Her main job is the cross-check nobody volunteers for — every place suggested gets measured against every dietary tag in the room, and she says plainly when one does not clear. Not “this may not suit some guests”, but which place, and which person it fails.

She is also reachable as a WhatsApp contact, so you can add a place, approve one, or ask where things stand without opening the room at all. Booth never texts you from any other number.

How does a plan get decided?

The person who started the plan decides it. Every other member has identical powers — suggest, approve, veto, talk — but the decision itself belongs to one person, because a group of eight with equal authority over the ending is how a decision stays open forever.

Deciding pins the chosen place to the top of the room and closes voting. The room does not disappear afterwards; it stays readable, which is what you want at 7pm on the night when somebody asks where they are going and what time.

What does Booth cost?

Nothing. Booth is free to use, there is no paid tier, and there are no ads. It sets no advertising or tracking cookies. What it stores and why is written out in full on the privacy page.

Do you need to install anything?

No. Booth runs in a browser, on a phone or a laptop, and a plan is a link. Nobody in your group needs to download an app before they can weigh in on where dinner is — which matters, because the person most likely to refuse to install something is usually the person you most need an answer from.