Move over OpenTable, Seated is the best restaurant reservation app for dining out, providing incredible rewards for simply taking a picture of your food receipt at the end of the meal.
Seated ranks as one of the best rewards app and is definitely worth a look. It’s free to use, partners with the most well-known restaurants, and lets you earn rewards for something you already plan on doing.
If you like eating out (and who doesn’t) and want to get paid for it, here’s our Seated app review including a sign-up bonus!
This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission at no cost to you if you decide to make a purchase through my links. Visit this page for more information. The content on this page is accurate as of the posting date; however, some of the offers mentioned may have expired.
Seated
Pros
- Generous rewards
- Redemption partners
- Intuitive
Cons
- Available cities
SIGN-UP BONUS
For a limited time, sign up for Seated and get a bonus between $10-$50 on top of what you’d normally earn with code NINJA1 – that’s up to 5x more than the standard amount!
What is the Seated app?
Seated is a restaurant reservation app that allows you to make reservations at over 3,000 restaurants across 10 major U.S. cities, including Boston, New York City, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Dallas, and Washington, D.C.
Ninja Update: Other cities that used to be on Seated, which includes Seattle, Houston, Denver, Austin, and Providence will be back soon.
Once you dine out, use the app to take a picture of the receipt, and you’ll get paid back up to 40% of the bill (before taxes and tips) in the form of Seated dollars.
Seated dollars can be exchanged on a 1:1 basis with its many partner brands, meaning for example, if you have $50 in Seated dollars, you can redeem them for a $50 Amazon gift card.
Recently, Seated has greatly expanded their partner list with many valuable places to redeem your rewards. Here are the current Seated partners as of January 2023:
- Amazon
- Apple
- Uber
- Airbnb
- Adidas
- AMC
- Amtrak
- Athleta
- Barry’s (Boston only)
- CB2
- ClassPass (New York City only)
- Crate&Barrel
- Delta Airlines
- Dunkin’
- Hulu
- iTunes
- Land’s End
- L.L.Bean
- Lululemon
- Macy’s
- Nike
- Nordstrom
- Petco
- Reading Partners
- REI
- Target
- Today’s Tix
- Sephora
- SoulCycle
- Starbucks
- StubHub
- Zara
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How does the Seated app work?
Once you download the app (add promo code NINJA1 during sign-up will give you an extra $10 to $50 bonus), all you need to provide is your name and mobile number in order to create a Seated account.
No personal details or credit cards required. Everything works in the background. Even the restaurants you’re making a reservation at doesn’t know you’re using the app to book a table.
Here’s the step-by-step guide to help you get started:
1. Browse available restaurants in your city & make a reservation or place an order
After you open the Seated app, start by tapping on the “Search” icon and select the city you’re currently in.
From there, choose whether you’re dining in, picking up, or want to have the food delivered to you:
Dining In
If you’re planning to dine in at a restaurant, select how many people will be in your group and the day and time you want to go. It will list all the restaurants available based on your selections.
You can also filter the restaurant list with various options; browse them alphabetically, the proximity of restaurants to your location, which ones are paying the highest rewards, or what places are the most popular.
Seated also integrates Yelp reviews and includes the menu for the establishment to help you out:
Still have trouble deciding? There’s a filter option that allows you to zone in on a specific neighborhood of a city. In Boston for instance, it lists all the major boroughs:
- Back Bay/Beacon
- Brighton
- Brookline/Allston
- Cambridge
- Charlestown
- Downtown
- East Boston
- Fenway
- Financial District
- Newton
- North End
- Quincy
- Seaport/Southie
- Somerville
- South End
Additionally, Seated allows you to look for a specific type of cuisine (French, Sushi, ect.) and the kind of ambiance you’re in the mood for (casual brunch, romantic date night, etc.).
Pickup (no longer an option post-Covid)
For pickups, simply choose the restaurant you want to pick up your food from. Depending on the restaurant, Seated will have you either:
- Start A Phone Order
- Start An Online Order
Once you grab your meal, make sure you upload your receipt to Seated to get credit.
Delivery (no longer option post-Covid)
Choosing to have your food order delivered to your address works in a similar way. After deciding on a restaurant, Seated will transfer you to the restaurant’s online menu where you can pick what you want.
Again, make sure you take a picture of the receipt with the app.
2. Enjoy your meal and then upload a picture of your restaurant receipt
Once you’re done eating, it’s time to upload your receipt on Seated. This is used as proof of where you ate and how much you spent.
If you’ve dined out at a restaurant, click on the “Bookings” icon and select the reservation that was made. Tap on “Upload” and take a picture of your receipt.
Did you place a delivery or pickup order? The click on the “Orders” icon instead and submit your receipt there:
It typically takes less than an hour (but it could take up to a day) for Seated to verify the amount you’ve spent and put the rewards in your account.
You’ll receive a notification on your phone once they credit your Seated account with the earned rewards.
3. Earn rewards for your meal
Your Seated rewards stay in your account and don’t expire, so you can redeem them immediately or wait to use it with future reservations in order to get a bigger reward.
Ninja Tip: You can get paid for your entire group’s bill. Grab the receipt next time you have an office outing or a birthday party!
What rewards should you get?
I’m an obsessed Amazon customer – almost all my online purchases except for clothing are through them, so I pretty much use all my rewards to get Amazon gift cards.
In two years of using the app, I have redeemed almost $4,000 worth of FREE Amazon credit!
Seated Referral Program
Seated has a great referral system to encourage you to refer family and friends!
When Seated first launch the app in 2017, it had a “just okay” referral incentive where you would get $10 for every person you referred and that person would receive $5 on their first dining reservation.
Recently, Seated has really upped their game. Your account can now get one of the following referral offers:
- Earn $20 per referral and the person you refer gets $5
- Earn $30 per referral and the person you refer gets $15
- Earn $35 per referral and the person you refer gets $5
- Earn $10 per referral and the person you refer gets $10-$50
The best version for new users is obviously the $10 to $50 bonus. That’s 2-5x the standard sign-up bonus and the person referring you gets $10 too.
Seated users usually get this bonus offer once they’ve had the app for a while. Fortunately, my new user referral code NINJA1 is included in this promotion!
Seated Partner Program
Seated created a new referral program in June 2019, where not only do you and the person you refer get extra money, but you also have a chance to become a Seated Partner.
As a Seated Partner, the company will pay you an additional 5% of what they earn on all of your future referee’s reservations!
To unlock this status, you need to refer 5 friends to download the Seated app and use it once. This is for anyone you refer going forward, so unfortunately, anyone you referred before June 2019 will not count towards this program.
Seated Reviews on App Store and Google Play Store
First, let me say the Seated app itself works flawlessly – both on Apple and Android phones. Apple’s App Store has stellar reviews of Seated, with iPhone users giving the app 4.7 out of 5.0 stars on average.
On the other hand, the reviews on Google Play Store is okay at 3.9 stars.
The main reason why Seated has a number of lukewarm reviews on Google is because of the lack of clarity in the app description. People downloaded Seated thinking there would be restaurants available near them, but for right now, it’s only available in these select cities:
- Boston
- New York City
- Chicago
- Dallas
- Atlanta
- Philadelphia
- Los Angeles
- San Francisco
- Washington D.C.
Although Apple mentions the limited amount of cities, Google doesn’t for its Android users. The bad reviews for this confusion is understandable, if somewhat misguided. Seated can easily fix this by editing the app description so it’s puzzling why they haven’t done so yet.
With that being said, the Seated team is trying to add new cities and restaurants as fast as possible. It’s a start-up company so it can’t expand as quickly as it would like, but they are working hard in making the app available in more cities.
Is there anything else I should know about Seated?
Seated is a game changer because there’s never been something that rewards users so well.
The only thing going against it is that its footprint is relatively small. You need to live near a major metropolitan city to find participating restaurants, but they are expanding. We reached out to Seated regarding this and they said 2 to 3 new restaurants are added every day.
Once that happens, the Seated app will be the only restaurant reservation tool you’ll need. Why? Because the rest of the competition doesn’t even come close.
Here’s a comparison between Seated and other popular reservation apps and what they typically pay out to users for a $100 meal:
| Reservation App | Rewards | # of Restaurants |
| Seated | $20 to $40 | 3,000 |
| OpenTable | $1 | 45,000 |
| Yelp | none | 4,000 |
| Resy | none | 2,000 |
It’s not even close.
The Bottom Line
Seated is hands down, the best app for dining out, picking up, or having food delivered to you.
The rewards are gigantic compared to its competitors. For that and the other reasons I talked about in this Seated app review, I’m giving the app 9.3 ninja stars out of 10!
Try Seated and get a $10-$50 bonus on your first reservation when you enter promo code NINJA1 during account registration.
I’ve also made a post with other Seated promotion codes you can add in addition to the sign-up bonus above. Be sure to check that often as we update the bonus codes as they come in.
Of course, this wouldn’t be The Money Ninja if this was it.
My favorite thing about Seated is that is allows you to stack Seated rewards with other dining reward programs. Stay tuned to learn how I use Seated in combination with other programs to get great deals when dining out!
If you want more reviews like this Seated app review, please let us know!
The Seated App is a SCAM! I have accumulated almost $600 in rewards point and they took it away because my account was inactive for 3 months. I never knew of this policy change. I was never notified and when I reach out to customer service, they said they emailed it once and extended the deadline for me. I never received the email from them nor a text message, which I usually do for promotions. In the past they had lots of restaurant listed on the app but not so much anymore. It was easy to get points for walk-in reservation in the past, but now there are blackout time where you can not make a walk in reservation during busy hours. You are basically selling your information when you submit your receipts. The receipts shows what you order, time and date of when you dine/ take out, restaurants address, and payment method/credit card information. If you don’t have the receipts you need to provide your credit card statement to verify. Other people have reported this issue where Seated failed to notify about the points expiration dates. The customer service keeps apologizing and saying they value our feedbacks but nothing is done about it.
JOHN1445 promo code will give you $15 and the writer $30.
Still glad for the free money, but disappointed in the writer for tricking readers.
Hi Danny – no trickery here. The $50 sign-up bonus was a June promotion that gave new users $50 and the referrer $15. That offer ended at the beginning of July. I’ll have our team update the post. It’s now $15 for both parties.
Use my Seated referral code JENNABOU. I got an email that my referral code will give new users a $50 bonus the first time they dine out. This is on top of what you normally earn too!
Awesome post! Unfortunately I think we don’t have this here in Europe…
Would someone be that nice and explain me how does Seated get’s this whole thing working? Who pays for this reward/where do they get this money back?
Thank you a lot!
Hi Mario – it’s good to see European readers here!
Seated partners with restaurant to help fill empty tables. When Seated app users make a reservation, the restaurant pays Seated a fee, of which they pass a portion of it to their customers. It’s a win-win-win situation. Restaurants get traffic they wouldn’t get otherwise, Seated gets a commission for facilitating the connection, and app users become super loyal because of all the rewards they can earn.
Seated has another option to donate your rewards to your favorite restaurants. Totally voluntary or you can still redeem for their other partners.
just used it for the first time and got the rewards a few hours after i uploaded the receipt. hope you got the referral
Where’s the page with all the promo codes?
I hope Seated stays around for a long while. It’s really an awesome app (minus a glitch last week where it didn’t work all of Saturday).
Seems like Seated is making a big push this year, saw their ads all over the NYC subway system.
i love seated and ive got all my friends on it to. best app ever!!
just went out for a birthday dinner with 10 people. the cost was $1,000, but Seated was offering 25%. we split the bill, but i ended up scanning the receipt for $250 back!!!
That’s awesome! Keep it up! Some readers here are approaching the $500 – $1,000 in redeemed rewards already!
come on seated, come back to los angeles already!
Seated is planning to come back to L.A. and San Francisco! They’re just super focused on the current cities right now. I think Atlanta was their latest launch and that was a few months ago.
i’m hosting a dinner for 12 tomorrow night, bring on the dough!
Not sure if this is a code, but Seated is offering an additional $5 if I go out by tomorrow night to certain restaurants. The code they put under my account is INFATUATION-BOSTON. Anyone else get it or how to tell which restaurants it works with?
Thanks Boston eater. Several other people received this too, but I haven’t gotten any feedback which restaurants it worked with. Expired now.
i don’t even know how I stopped up here, but i’m glad i stumbled onto this post. nice app for food in new york. thanks!
I love Seated!!!!!!!! I downloaded and signed up because of your review and bookmarked your promo code page. I check it every time before I eat in the city 🙂
Thanks for your continued support!
Nice review! Love your writing style and platform. Have you thought about a dedicated section for apps? You have quite a few reviews now and it would help readers navigate to all of them easier.
Hi CX,
Thanks for the suggestion. It’s something I’ll definitely think about, but right now as I build out the content, I don’t want to make another category (stretched too thin). Once the site gets a little older with more posts, then I can see how that would be helpful. In the mean time, I’ll try to find a solution so you guys can have a consolidated view of all the reviews.
Appreciate the feedback!
There are a lot of wonderful apps created all over the world! And this one is not an exception! Great review! I will be checking this from time to time, as you guys update the bonus codes frequently!
Thanks Lloyd. We’ll continue to update the promotion codes as we receive them. If you have any, please feel free to forward them or reply to that post with the code and its expiration date. Thanks!
Where can I find the promo codes?
Hi Kelley,
You can find the main promotion code list here: https://themoneyninja.com/seated-app-promotion-codes/
I also created a special promotion for September/October here: https://themoneyninja.com/seated-promo-codes-september-2019/
Enjoy!
Thanks a lot! More free lunches 🙂
This is awesome! Got $30 off my $50 meal! $15 using your code and $15 because the restaurant was 30% rewards on Seated.
Thanks Matt! Glad I could help you save. Look out for more posts related to this soon!
I love this app. I was skeptical because Seated in the Google store only had like 2.5/5 stars… searched for reviews and found this post. Made $180 from it already!
I also saw that (on Google Play and the Apple App Store). I think part of the reason is Seated doesn’t make it clear that it’s only available in select cities right now, so someone downloading the app will be disappointed that their town of (insert small random town) doesn’t have any participating restaurants.