Prices and coverage were checked in August 2026 against each service's own published pages. See what is open in NYC or San Francisco right now.

// Comparison content. Kept factual and checkable: competitor details are // limited to what they publish themselves, and the honest-limitations // section is not optional - a comparison page that only flatters its // author gets dismantled in public and deserves to be. const SECTIONS = [ { heading:

, paras: [ `Every option in this category is one of three things. A platform waitlist, run by the booking platform itself. A monitoring service, which watches restaurant calendars and alerts you. Or an auto-booker, which tries to complete the booking for you. They fail and succeed in different ways, and the right answer depends on how much you care about one specific table.`, ], bullets: [ `Platform waitlists (Resy Notify, OpenTable

Monitoring services (SnagRes, ReservationFinder): watch calendars across platforms and tell you what opened. You book it yourself.

Auto-bookers: attempt to book on your behalf, usually by holding your account credentials. Faster in principle, and the category most likely to fall foul of platform terms.

, paras: [ `Free, built into Resy, and the obvious first thing to try. You join a waitlist for a specific restaurant, date and party size, and Resy tells you if something matching frees up.`, `Its constraints are structural rather than accidental: one date at a time, a queue you share with everyone else who joined, and Resy restaurants only. If the table you want is on Tock or OpenTable, it does not apply at all. Use it; just do not expect it to cover a whole month or a whole city.`, ], }, { heading:

, paras: [ `A monitoring service covering Resy, OpenTable, Tock and SevenRooms in New York. It publishes two tiers: roughly $10 a month to monitor three restaurants, and roughly $20 a month for ten. It is the most direct comparison to what we do, and it has a genuine advantage: a substantially larger library of written guides, and more coverage pages by city and restaurant.`, `Where the two differ most is pricing shape and free access. ReservationFinder

Alerts can be filtered by party size, date range and time of day, and are capped at one email per restaurant per hour so a high-churn restaurant cannot bury you.

, paras: [ `Three cases, stated plainly. If you want a service that books the table for you rather than telling you it exists, we do not do that and do not plan to; it requires handing over your account credentials and sits badly with platform terms.`, `If you eat in a city we do not cover, we are useless to you. We are New York and San Francisco only, and a service with wider geography will serve you better.`, `And if you want one specific Saturday at one Resy restaurant and nothing else, Resy Notify is free and may be all you need.`, ], }, { heading:

, bullets: [ `Only ever booking Resy, one date at a time: start with Resy Notify. It costs nothing.`, `Hunting across platforms, especially in San Francisco: you need a monitor, because SF

Watching more than a handful of restaurants: compare monitored-restaurant caps, which is where the pricing differences actually bite.

Wanting to try before paying: check whether the service lets you see live availability without an account.

An honest comparison of restaurant reservation alert services: Resy Notify, ReservationFinder and SnagRes. What each covers, what each costs, and where each is the wrong choice.

Platform waitlists, monitoring services and auto-bookers compared for hard-to-book restaurants in New York and San Francisco, including where each option is the wrong one.

, }) return ( <ArticleShell eyebrow="Comparison" title="Reservation alert services, compared honestly" standfirst="We make one of the products on this page, so read it with that in mind. The comparison below sticks to what each service publishes about itself, and includes the cases where ours is the wrong choice." next={[ { to: