Current options like GroupMe chats don't work well.
Information is always outdated, and students are left guessing if the food is still there.
GroupMe posts often are missing location info or other relevant details.
You can't tell how safe the food is before going to check it out.
This is how you see all free food posting from everyone else on campus.
Quickly see all free food posts near your current location, and read up-to-date info about the post.
If you plan on going, check-in to claim one of the available servings of food. This tells everyone else how many servings to expecct to be left.
Notice something out of date? Easily add a comment to a free food post to let other know the current situation.
Quickly fill out the Free Food Form to share all the important info about the free food you've encountered.
Once all servings on a Free Food Post have been claimed, the post will automatically delete itself, and nobody else can check in.
Great question! We do two things here. All food is marked as perishable or non-perishable by the original poster. This changes the behavior of the post as users interact with it.
First, if a user checks into a food post that is marked perishable, they will be given a concise food safety warning, with resources to read more.
Second, all persiahble food posts will automatically delete within 2 hours, while all none-perishable food posts auto delete after 4 hours.
We rely on crowdsourcing information here. If the post is still live that should mean servings are still available. If someone has seen the free food is gone, they can add a comment to the post to notify others that the food is no longer available. This is an imperfect system, but still more realtime than current options today.
Easy. If you are the first user at your school, when you sign-up, you will automatically onboard your entire school. We will create a seperate bucket for all postings that are generated from your school, meaning you will only see posts from others from your school.
To onboard a school and get many users, the best approach is grassroots, word of mouth marketing. Tell a friend, and tell that friend to tell a friend, and so on and so forth until you reach a critical mass at your school. We have a simple instagram page that is a great way to quickly share information about our app.
On top of that, pitching to student groups and hanging posters around high traffic areas have been hugley succesful. Please use this image as a poster for your convenience.
You will only receive notifications about and see posts from other users at your school (indicated by your .edu email address), and only people from your school can see your posts.
Currenlty, we have not added the feature to post food on Android, do to a bug with uploading images. If you would like this feature, please email us and we will try to get to it. Sorry!
Nope. The posts on this app are entirely populated by students and faculty at the school.
Nope. Currently you can only upload an image that you take with your camera. If this is a feature you would like added, email us or DM us on instagram!
I don't. I built this app for fun and not for profit. If you want to show thanks, you can do 1 of 2 things.
The choice is yours.
Yup.
Nowadays I am working on
Cache-it and
am not actively supporting FreeEats as much. If you want seem
easy development experience, and want to contribute to this
project, DM us on ig or email us! I would love to onboard any
devs who want to improve the app.
Yes. At my alma mater, WashU, we had over 500 users at one point consistenly sharing free food with each other via FreeEats. I have not tested this thoroughly at any other campus, but I beleive it could be used to help other college or corporate campuses.
Here is an old quick ideabounce pitch explaining the origin of the app.
