Why Locked Out exists

You walk into a restaurant. You want the WiFi password. You have to flag down a server, interrupt their day, ask them to repeat it twice, and then type it in wrong anyway. Or you need the bathroom code and there is nobody around to ask, or the staff are slammed, or you just don't feel like having that conversation right now.

The problem

Almost every restaurant, cafe, and bar in the world has a bathroom code or a WiFi password. That information exists. It's on a sticky note behind the counter, on a chalkboard above the espresso machine, or in the head of every employee who works there. But for everyone walking in the door, it might as well be locked behind a vault.

Multiply this small bit of friction by the number of times you visit a new place every week, and it adds up. The information should be shared. The technology to share it is trivial. Nobody has built a clean, fast, free way to do it. So we did.

The solution

Locked Out is a community database of WiFi passwords and bathroom codes for restaurants, cafes, and bars. Real people who have been to these places submit the codes they found, and the community votes on whether they still work. No accounts needed to view. Just search, find, and go.

How it works

Search for the restaurant you are at. If someone has already submitted a code, you will see it along with a confidence score based on community votes. If the code works, hit upvote. If it has changed, hit downvote and submit the new one. The whole interaction takes a few seconds.

Behind the scenes, every submission has a score that goes up with upvotes and down with downvotes. The highest scoring code for a given restaurant rises to the top of the page so you always see the most trusted answer first. Recent submissions get a small freshness boost, because a code from last week is more reliable than a code from two years ago.

When a code stops working and people downvote it, it sinks. When the new code is submitted, it climbs. The database self-corrects without anyone having to manage it.

Reputation and the leaderboard

Every upvote on one of your submissions earns you reputation. Downvotes cost a little. Your total reputation is your contribution score, and the highest scoring contributors show up on the public leaderboard.

This is the friendly competition layer that keeps the database growing. People who care about being helpful end up at the top. People who try to game the system by submitting nonsense end up with negative scores and eventually lose access. Reputation makes contributors visible and accountable without anyone having to police the platform manually.

Trust and accuracy

Crowdsourced data lives or dies by trust. We take a few specific steps to keep the signal high. Submissions require a real Google sign-in, so every code is tied to an identifiable account. Self-voting is blocked, so you can't inflate your own score. Submissions are length-limited and sanitized, so people can't use the field to inject anything weird. And the voting system is designed so that wrong answers fade fast while right answers stay near the top.

The result is a database that is, by design, more accurate the more people use it. Quiet venues with one or two submissions are less reliable than busy venues with dozens. The confidence score on every code tells you how much weight to give it.

Privacy and respect

We don't track your location in the background. We don't sell your data. We don't build a profile of where you've been. The only time your coordinates are sent anywhere is when you tap "Use my location" to find nearby restaurants, and even then they aren't stored.

We also try to be a good neighbor to the businesses listed here. If you own a venue and don't want your code shared, email us and we'll take it down. The goal is to help customers, not to cause problems for the people running these places.

The community

Locked Out only works because people contribute. Every code submitted saves someone else the awkward interaction at the counter. The database grows every time someone walks into a new place and shares what they find. The map fills in city by city, neighborhood by neighborhood, cafe by cafe. If you know a code, add it. The next person to walk in will thank you.

What's next

The web app is the foundation. From here we're focused on coverage (more cities, more venues), accuracy (smarter freshness signals, clearer confidence labels), and accessibility (an installable app experience that works offline so you can pull up a code even when the restaurant's WiFi is the very thing you're trying to connect to). The roadmap is shaped by what people actually use.

Built by

Locked Out is an independent project. No venture capital, no big team, no master plan to sell your data. Just one of those small useful tools the internet should have had a decade ago. If you have feedback, found a bug, or just want to say something, reach out at hello@lockedout.codes.