Free, and why you can check it
Plenty of things start free and quietly stop being free. Saying “we never will” is cheap — everyone says it. So here is how this one is built, and how you can check each part yourself without taking our word for it.
There is no sign-up, so there is nothing to lock
A guide can start charging later because it holds something of yours: an account, a saved list, your email, your history. Then one day it sits behind a login.
We never built that. There is no account on this site. Nothing you do here is stored on our side, and the dishes you save stay in your own browser. We could not put this behind a login later without throwing the whole thing away and starting again.
You can check this yourself: there is no “sign in” anywhere on this site, and you have never been asked for an email to see a price.
What it costs to run
People are right to ask who is paying. Usually the answer is an investor who needs that money back, which is exactly why “free” stops. Here it is nobody: no investors, no ads, no commission, no paid rankings.
- Hosting
- £0
- Domain name and email
- under £100 a year
- Staff
- none
- Paid for by
- the founder, and readers who tip
That is the whole budget. It is small on purpose: a guide that costs almost nothing to run never has to start charging you.
Readers can chip in through our Ko-fi page if they want to. Nothing here is locked behind it and tipping gets you nothing extra — no early access, no special list, no say in what we pick. It only means the bill is paid by the people who read this instead of by anyone who wants to sell to them. Restaurants still cannot pay, and that is the part that matters.
Why a doughnut chain is in one list but never the other
If you have looked at both of our lists, you will have noticed something that looks like a contradiction. Krispy Kreme sits in the free food list. It will never appear in our recommendations. That is deliberate, and it is one rule, not two standards.
Anyone, chains included
Free food is almost always given away by big brands, because they are the ones with a marketing budget. Leaving them out would mean an empty list that helps nobody.
- Any brand, chain or independent
- Must be genuinely free or an unusually large giveaway
- Checked against the brand’s own post, with the date
- Nobody pays to appear
Independent kitchens only
This is the part we stand behind: the one dish worth ordering. A chain does not need our help to be found, and a guide full of them would be worth nothing to you.
- Independent places only, no chains
- One dish per place, with the real price and its source
- Nobody can pay to be listed or to rank higher
- Removed the day an owner asks
Chains are where free food comes from. Independents are where our recommendations come from. We never mix the two up.
We also use chains as the measuring stick
There is one more place a chain price is useful: as a comparison. A supermarket meal deal costs £3.74 to £4.25. Knowing that is what makes a £5 plate of home-cooked food from a small kitchen mean something.
That is what our Cheap Eats Index measures each month: what a proper independent meal actually costs in each city, next to the chain price everybody already knows. The full list behind it is free to download, so you can check our arithmetic rather than trust it.
What would have to happen for this to change
Being honest about the limits is part of the point. If this site ever carried anything paid, it would be a clearly labelled “Sponsored” block that never changes which dish we pick or where it ranks. The recommendations themselves are not for sale, and no amount of money changes an order.
If that ever changes, it will be written on this page, with the date, and the old wording will still be here below it. A promise you can check later is worth more than one you cannot.
Questions
Ask anything at [email protected]. If you run a restaurant, there is a separate page on how to tell a real message from us, and on what listing involves.
First published 31 October 2026. Changed 1 November 2026: readers can now tip through Ko-fi, so the budget line above says so. The previous wording said the founder alone paid for it. Nothing else changed, and restaurants still cannot pay.