Rezhound

What Rezhound does

Rezhound was a free, web-based reservation alerting service that monitored OpenTable for available tables and notified users via email (and later SMS) when reservations opened at their selected restaurants, dates, and times. Founded in 2012 and launched publicly on January 14, 2013, the product was built as a personal side project by Reed Kavner while he taught himself to code, initially to score elusive reservations at San Francisco's State Bird Provisions. The service operated without funding, employees, or formal company infrastructure, processing over 200,000 reservation requests across 10,000+ restaurants during its lifetime.

The underlying technology was a lightweight scraping-and-notification layer on top of OpenTable's public reservation data, with no proprietary models, integrations beyond OpenTable, or mobile applications. Distribution was entirely product-led and self-serve through the Rezhound website, with user acquisition driven by earned media coverage in Gizmodo, Thrillist, and Eater shortly after launch. Users included ordinary diners, hotel concierges, executive assistants, and even OpenTable employees, indicating broad horizontal appeal across both consumer and professional use cases.

The business model was explicitly non-commercial: Rezhound was always free, never introduced pricing tiers, and generated no revenue across its operational lifetime. The service was discontinued in March 2022 after OpenTable and competing reservation apps introduced native availability alert features, eliminating Rezhound's core value proposition, while the platform's ongoing fragility (built by a self-taught developer) made continued maintenance impractical.

Name

Rezhound

Legal name

Rezhound

Website

https://rezhound.com

Company type

Private

Founded year

2012

Operating status

Closed

Headcount range

1–10 employees

Short description

Rezhound was a free, now-defunct web service that sent email and SMS alerts when hard-to-get OpenTable reservations opened up, serving individual diners, hotel concierges, and executive assistants from 2013 until March 2022.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Headquarters

HQ city

Brooklyn

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2C

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Infrastructure, Technology or R&D

Revenue model

1. No Revenue Stream: Rezhound was always free to users. The product was discontinued in March 2022 and never generated any revenue.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion1 record

Distribution channels1 record

Marketing channels1 record

Core offering

Rezhound was a free, web-based notification service that monitored OpenTable for available reservations at user-specified restaurants, dates, and times, and sent email (and later SMS) alerts to users the moment a table opened up. It was a single-product service built as a personal project and operated from January 14, 2013 until it was discontinued in March 2022.

Product overview

Rezhound was a single, standalone product—a free reservation alerting service that integrated with OpenTable. Users selected a restaurant and date/time, and Rezhound would notify them via email (later adding text messaging) when a reservation opened up. The product was discontinued in March 2022 as OpenTable and other reservation apps built their own native alerting features.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• Rezhound

Quantifiable outcome

• Over 200,000 reservation requests processed for over 10,000 restaurants

Named customers3 records

Segments1 record

Ideal customer profiles1 record

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

No

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration1 record

Feature1 record

Scale indicators4 records

Recent moves3 records

Expansion highlights1 record

Emerging players

• Hostme: Restaurant reservation and waitlist management app with guest-facing notification features; smaller-scale competitor in the same alerting-for-diners category.
• MouseWatcher: Niche availability-alert tool specifically for Disneyland reservations, built as a direct conceptual descendant of Rezhound for a different vertical — same architecture and user model.

Direct peers

• Tablein: Restaurant reservation management platform with built-in guest notifications and availability alerts, serving the same diner-facing booking use case as Rezhound.
• Tock: Reservation and ticketing platform (Square-owned) serving high-demand restaurants with built-in notification and waitlist features that address the same diner-side scarcity problem Rezhound targeted.
• SevenRooms: Restaurant CRM and reservation platform with guest-facing booking, waitlist, and alert functionality that overlaps directly with Rezhound's alerting value proposition for diners.
• Yelp Waitlist (formerly Nowait): Yelp's restaurant waitlist and reservation product addresses the same real-time table-availability pain point Rezhound solved, with native distribution through Yelp's consumer audience.
• Resy: Restaurant reservation platform owned by American Express that ships native availability alerts to diners — directly absorbing the functional gap Rezhound filled and competing for the same diner use case.

Broad incumbents

• OpenTable: The underlying reservation platform Rezhound scraped; OpenTable now ships its own native 'Availability Alerts for Diners' feature, making it both the foundational data source and a direct functional competitor.

Market position

Strengths3 records

Weaknesses4 records

Competitive moat2 records

Key risks5 records

Key highlights4 records

Customer concentration

• Xx.com/rezhound

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Rezhound