About SpotACafe
SpotACafe is a community-curated cafe finder. 273 cafes across 49 neighbourhoods, each verified by real visits, with amenities voted on by the community.
What SpotACafe does
SpotACafe helps you find a cafe that fits how you want to spend the next two hours — laptop work, a quiet read, a date, a quick espresso. Every cafe shows opening hours, a neighbourhood, crowd-sourced amenity tags (wifi, outlets, quiet, laptop-friendly, outdoor seating, vegan options), user reviews and recent check-ins.
How cafes get verified
Most cafes are seeded from OpenStreetMap. Anyone can add a missing cafe; that submission stays in a pending state and only becomes visible to the full community once three different users confirm it on the ground. There is no editor or admin gatekeeper — the verification system is the community.
How amenities are decided
Every amenity tag — wifi, outlets, quiet, outdoor seating, pet-friendly, vegan, specialty coffee — is a community vote. Signed-in users upvote or downvote a tag for a cafe; the net score determines whether the tag is shown. This means amenities reflect the community's net consensus, not one person's opinion.
Where opening hours come from
Hours are seeded from OpenStreetMap and backfilled from Google Places. Users can suggest edits when hours change. Every cafe page shows the source and the last update time, so you know how stale the data might be before you walk over.
How SpotACafe stays free
SpotACafe is free for everyone, with no ads. It runs on free, open-source infrastructure: OpenStreetMap tiles via CARTO, Leaflet for the map, Supabase's free tier for the social layer (reviews, check-ins, photos, friends). No subscription, no premium tier, no upsell.
Editorial principles
- Community over editor. No paid placements, no sponsored cafes, no preferred listings. Order on landing pages reflects review count and rating.
- Verifiable data only. Every claim (wifi, hours, address) is either crowd-sourced and votable, or from a named public dataset (OpenStreetMap, Google Places).
- Reversible mistakes. Any user can propose an edit; any wrong tag can be downvoted; any wrong cafe can be flagged.
- Transparency. See the data sources page for the full provenance of every field.