How we do it

What this site is

kidseatfree.co.uk is a free, anonymous directory of UK restaurants, pubs, hotels, cafés and garden centres that run a “kids eat free” or “kids eat for £1” offer. No accounts, no login, no email signup. You tap a button, share where you are, and we show you who’s open near you tonight.

It’s editorial — we list venues because they run an offer that helps families eat out cheaply, not because they paid for placement. Where a button takes you to a restaurant, booking platform, or partner page, we make that destination clear, and any commercial relationship will be disclosed where it applies.

Where the venue list comes from

Every chain in the directory has been chosen because it publishes a kids-eat-free or kids-eat-for-a-pound offer on its own website. We have 47 chains live today, with 2,240 UK venues currently shown as recently verified.

For each chain we record the exact deal terms (e.g. “one kids’ meal free with every adult main, Mon–Fri 3–7pm”), the days of the week the offer runs, whether it’s school-holidays-only, an age limit if the chain publishes one, and the official chain page where the offer is described.

Venue addresses and coordinates are checked against a reputable mapping source at seed time so the map link goes to the right place. We do not store or display third-party ratings, reviews or photos — only the venue’s name, address, and verified location.

How we keep it fresh

We regularly re-check each chain’s official offer page. If the offer is still there and the terms match, the venue stays in your results. If something is unclear or has changed, we flag it for human review rather than guessing.

We never auto-deactivate an offer based on a single failed check. Removing a deal is always a human decision. Venues that fall out of date quietly drop out of results until we’ve re-checked them — better to show fewer venues than wrong ones.

What the confidence states mean

Each card carries one of five confidence states. They are the most important signal on the page — they tell you how certain we are that the deal is live.

• High — recently re-checked against the chain’s own offer page, and the deal terms matched cleanly. The card shows the deal without any caveat.
• Medium — recently re-checked, but the match was weaker (for example, the chain has reworded its offer page). The deal still shows, but we’re less certain it’s exactly the headline we display. Worth confirming at the venue if it matters.
• Parent-confirmed — a parent has emailed us to say the deal was still running on a specific date at a specific venue, and we’ve recorded that confirmation.
• Needs a recheck — the offer was verified at some point but it hasn’t been re-checked recently. The card is shown but it carries an explicit “Checking…” pill rather than a normal deal pill, and the deal-type badge is hidden. We don’t pretend a deal is live when we’re not sure.
• Offer ended — the deal is past its known valid-through date or the chain has pulled it. These never appear on the main results list.

The principle we hold ourselves to: a card never shows a “Kids Eat Free” or “Kids Eat for £1” badge unless the offer is currently in one of the confident states and the deal’s valid period hasn’t ended. If we’re not sure, the badge doesn’t render.

“Estimated” vs “typical” — what the cost line means

The family-cost figure on each card is a range, not a number, and it always carries one of two words: estimated or typical. We are deliberately careful here — overclaiming what dinner will cost is a quick way to lose trust with parents who do the maths.

• Estimated — we know the deal terms, we know how many adults and children you are, but the chain doesn’t publish a precise minimum adult spend. The range is built from a coarse per-cuisine band. It is intentionally wide.
• Typical — the chain publishes a specific minimum adult spend (for example, a buffet price). We use that figure with a small margin so the number still acknowledges menu drift between branches.

The line is never labelled “total cost”. We don’t know your starter, your drinks, your dessert, or whether you’re tipping — and we will not pretend to. The figure is a sanity check on the deal, not a quote.

Why some offers come with conditions

A few kinds of restriction show up often enough that we surface them as badges. They are not gotchas — they are the actual rules the chain publishes on its own offer page.

• App required — some chains only honour the deal when you book or check in through their own app. The card flags this up front. If you don’t want to download anything, the results page has a filter that hides app-only offers.
• Adult spend required — most kids-eat-free offers attach to an adult main. Some go further and set a minimum spend on the adult side. The card shows the exact figure where the chain publishes one.
• School holidays only — several chains only run the offer during school-holiday weeks. We use the official school calendars for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland — so a card flagged “School holidays only” really is live this week if you can see it on the results page during a holiday window. Where we can’t pin a venue to a specific local-authority calendar, the language softens to “likely school-holiday offer”.
• Branch may vary — a small number of chains only run the offer at a subset of their venues rather than the whole brand. We track which sites participate and only show the deal on those cards. The badge is a reminder that the chain itself isn’t a single rule.

Every condition is sourced from the chain’s own offer page. If a chain quietly drops a restriction (or adds one) the next re-check picks it up and a human reviews the change before the card copy moves.

The anti-hallucination principle

If we can’t verify an offer, we flag it for human review rather than guessing. We never invent or fabricate confirmation, never extrapolate from training data, and never auto-deactivate an offer on a single failed check.

Where AI assistance is used at all, it’s used sparingly and only as a fallback when the official page is ambiguous — and the result is always reviewed by a human before it changes what you see on a card.

Crucially: we never call an AI model from inside a request. When you load the site, no language model runs. That keeps the site fast, cheap, and predictable, and it means what you see on the page is grounded in data we’ve already verified — not generated on the fly.

Where the photos come from

Every chain’s hero photo is sourced from the chain’s own website, press kit, or a permissively-licensed image library. We never use AI-generated imagery for brand photos. The full attribution trail for every image is published on the site (see the credits page).

Photos are served from image hosting we control. We don’t hot-link to third-party servers at runtime.

What we don’t do

• We don’t store your postcode, your location, or anything else about you.
• We don’t set tracking cookies. We don’t run third-party analytics.
• We don’t sell data — there’s no data to sell.
• We don’t take affiliate fees from bookings.
• We don’t guarantee an offer is still running tonight — venues can pause deals at short notice. Always check at the venue before you turn up if it matters.

If you find something wrong

If an offer’s changed, a venue’s closed, or a card shows the wrong details, please drop us a line via the contact page. We’ll fix it.