How it works
Verify finalists, not candidates.
A five-question interview becomes a spec. We fetch ~50 live listings, drop what fails the spec cheaply (price shape, entire place, rough area), verify the ten best against the map, and show three — best overall, best value, and closest to the spot you named. Store questions, never answers: what decays fast is fetched live; what decays slowly is cached with its timestamp.
Real in this preview
- Listings & stay totals
- Booking.com and Airbnb, fetched live per search via cloud scrapers. Totals are for the whole stay and say when they exclude taxes; a per-night-looking price fails the run loudly. If one site fails, the search continues on the other and tells you.
- Same place, both sites
- Listings within 60 m with matching names are paired; the cheaper total leads the card and the other site's price is shown even when it beats our affiliate link.
- Venue counts
- OpenStreetMap: every bar, café, pub and restaurant within 6 km of your spot is fetched once and cached 30 days; each finalist's 800 m circle is counted from it. The check time is on the card.
- Distances
- Your landmark is geocoded with Nominatim; distances are straight-line, walk time at a relaxed 80 m/min, rounded up.
- Timestamps
- Every number shows when it was observed. Prices are never cached.
- Understanding you
- Chips are read instantly by rules. Free text goes to Claude, which returns a validated change to your spec and a one-line confirmation; if it can't, the rules take over for that answer. The small note under your spec says which one answered.
- The otter's watch
- Your spec and today's baseline are saved. The otter re-runs the search every 3 days (Booking only) and daily on both sites inside two weeks, and emails you only when a verified pick drops 5% or $50, or the cheapest one disappears. Every check is logged on your watch page with its time and what it cost. Change the spec in a sentence.
Sample data sample
- Recent chatter
- The review-chatter line is a placeholder until a review source is wired.
- Quiet street
- Shown as a labelled stub when you ask for it; a traffic/noise signal is planned.
- Help me pick (without a key)
- Without the Claude engine, discovery maps a sentence to Austin and a date range by a phrase table.
- Affiliate & payment
- No affiliate id and no payment in the preview; the watch is free.
Clean incentives
Picks are ranked by your criteria, never by commission. When more sites are wired we will show the same property's price on each, even when that costs us the referral. We stage the booking link; you book.