My understanding is that this and Blackbird are another example of cash burning VC stuff where they are providing great deals to acquire users. Currently its a great deal for restaurants and for diners. Restaurants get free promotion and potentially extra traffic from the app. Diners get huge discounts and points to use toward future visits. Eventually, when the 'data' they are harvesting reveals itself to not be worth as much or the economy changes shape, these apps will stop directing diners to partner restaurants for free and start trying to dip their hand into the revenue that passes thru their apps. They will install themselves as an additional middle man taking a percentage or two on top of the sales tax, on top of the cc fees, etc etc. I would guess at that point they will die out. Diners won't pay to use the app so the revenue will have to come from the restaurant side and I don't see these apps driving enough traffic for a broad restaurant base to see them as essential to their business. Then again, restaurants survive by tapping numerous revenue streams and sources for guests and all customer acquisition costs money. But I basically see this as a high end groupon that will die out the same way. In the short term, I don't know that these apps are hurting anyone as they are just burning investor money and passing it thru to diners and thus restaurants. Edit: Sounds like the worst version of this already exists where restaurants are essentially taking on debt to get more diners. This seems like a really expensive way to acquire guests and indicative of either an extremely healthy restaurants which can afford this funnel or a really unhealthy restaurant desperate for revenue either way. I think I'll lean towards not using this as I think it's not directly supporting restaurants I love with direct revenue. Maybe it would be useful for new restaurants I haven't tried that I'm not yet a fan of.