KF.SocialSo this page answers one narrow question: what can you actually book for a single night in London without joining anything? Everything about another company below is quoted from its own pages with the date it was read.
What requires a membership
Timeleft is subscription-only. Its help centre lists periods of one, three or six months, and says the available options "may vary by region and are displayed during sign-up" (help.timeleft.com, read 2 September 2026). No price is published anywhere on its site or help centre. There is no single-dinner option: the subscription is what gives you access to book. It renews automatically unless you cancel before the next billing date, and is generally non-refundable once a new billing period has started, explicitly including cancelling on the day the renewal charges. You also cannot switch plans in the app; you cancel, wait for the current one to expire, then buy the other.
None of that is unreasonable for a resident who eats out with it every week. It is simply a poor fit for a stay measured in nights.
Meetup+ is a subscription too, though a different kind: Meetup itself is free to join and most listings are free to attend, so you do not need Meetup+ to go to a Meetup. What it buys is the full attendee list, full member profiles, the "Who will be there" feature, unrestricted messaging, waitlist priority and fee exemption on paid events (help.meetup.com, read 4 September 2026). Its free trial begins a recurring subscription automatically at the end of the trial. Some organisers also charge dues for their own group, flagged by a "Request to join" button.
DayOfUs lists London and is free to join, with either a pay-per-event option or an optional subscription (dayofus.com, read 4 September 2026). The per-event route means it belongs in both halves of this page.
What you can book for one night
A free Meetup event. No membership needed, nothing to cancel, and often nothing to pay. The trade-offs are that you pick the event yourself and that group sizes vary enormously: browsing London on 4 September 2026, the first screen of listings showed attendee counts of 74, 100, 163, 187, 228, 234, 239, 263, 312 and 546. If you want company rather than a crowd, read the numbers before you RSVP.
A supper club ticket. One sitting, one payment, the food usually included. The constraint is lead time rather than money: the good ones sell out weeks ahead, which is the horizon a work trip rarely has.
A seat at a matched table. This is what KF.Social does, and the whole of it is below.
KF.Social, in full
Three nights a week, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, sitting at 19:00, in Soho, Shoreditch and Clapham. Three nights rather than seven on purpose: concentrating the week onto fewer tables is what lets a table actually fill, and a table that does not fill does not run.
A table is laid for six. A seventh booking is not turned away, because the seat count is the shape of the table rather than a cap: another table of six opens instead.
It is 15 pounds for the seat, shown before you pay, and you pay for your own food and drinks at the restaurant. There is no subscription, no membership, and nothing left running behind you when you fly home. The app is free to download. Booking gates on two things, being 18 or over and paying, and on nothing else.
The timings are fixed. Booking closes six hours before the sitting, and the restaurant lands at the same point. Who you are sitting with lands an hour before, along with the group chat. Three hours before, the table is measured against a floor of four seats: under it, the dinner does not run and everyone who booked is refunded in full.
Cancelling has three rungs. Outside 72 hours, the 15 pounds goes back to your card. Between 72 and 24 hours it comes back as KF Points, credit toward a later dinner at 1,000 points to the pound. Inside 24 hours it does not come back, because by then the table has been built around you and the seat cannot be resold. If your meetings routinely overrun, that last rung is the one to plan around.
The table is assembled rather than drawn at random. Anyone you have asked to avoid is never seated with you, and that rule is absolute rather than a preference. After that the table is built for shared interests, close age bands and a balanced room, with a heavy weighting against seating you with people you have already met or sending you to a restaurant you have already eaten at.
When a subscription is the better buy
Worth saying, because this page is otherwise one-sided. If you live in London, or you are here for six months, or you will go most weeks, a subscription is almost certainly cheaper per dinner than paying per seat, and the automatic renewal that is a trap for a visitor is a convenience for a resident. The question is not which model is better. It is how many dinners you are going to eat before you leave.