KF.SocialOne disambiguation first, because it wastes people's time: "TimeLeft" is also the name of a countdown-timer program for Windows. If that is what you were after, none of this is relevant.
Reason one: you do not want a subscription
Timeleft is subscription-only. Its help centre article "What Subscription Plans Are Available?" says the subscription "gives you access to book events in your city", offers one, three and six month periods, and adds that "available options may vary by region and are displayed during sign-up". Food, drinks and venue costs are paid on the day, which it states plainly.
That model is well suited to somebody who lives in London and goes most weeks. It suits a two week stay much less well, because you are buying a month to use two evenings of it. Its help centre also says subscriptions are "generally non-refundable once a new billing period has started", including when you cancel on the day it renews, and that anything bought through the App Store or Google Play must be refunded by Apple or Google rather than by Timeleft. None of that is unusual. It is simply worth reading before you pick a six month period for a trip that lasts eleven nights.
What to look at instead, in London:
- KF.Social. 15 pounds a seat, per dinner, published before you pay, plus your food and drinks at the restaurant. A table of six. No membership to hold in order to book. London only, which is the whole limitation and we would rather say it here than have you discover it. Cancel more than 72 hours before and the 15 pounds returns to your card, between 72 and 24 hours it returns as KF Points, and inside 24 hours it does not return.
- DayOfUs. Algorithm-matched group dinners with four to six people at a table, matched from a personality quiz, with the app booking the restaurant. Its homepage listed London among its cities when we read it on 4 September 2026. It is free to join with a pay-per-event option or an optional subscription, so you can use it without committing to a period.
- Meetup. Most London listings are free to attend, so it costs nothing to try. The trade-off is size and self-service, covered below.
Reason two: you want the price written down before you commit
This is a real and specific complaint, and it is checkable. Timeleft does not publish a price anywhere on its website or in its help centre. The help centre says available options vary by region and are shown during sign-up. So you find out what it costs by starting to sign up.
If that is what sent you looking, the London options that publish a number are:
- KF.Social: 15 pounds a seat, shown before you pay. Food and drinks yours at the venue.
- Meetup: the price is on each listing, and most London listings are free. Note that Meetup's own help centre describes its free tier as "the limited free plan": full attendee lists, member profiles, the "Who will be there" feature and unrestricted messaging require its Meetup+ subscription, and individual groups may charge member dues set by the organizer.
- Eatwith: each experience carries a price set by the host, shown on the listing before you book.
Reason three: you do not want a matched dinner at all
Sometimes the format is the problem rather than the supplier. A matched table is a lot of social effort at the end of a working day, and some people would rather choose the room they are walking into.
- Meetup. You browse and pick an event rather than being seated at one. The breadth in London is enormous: language exchanges, walks, comedy, technology talks, dancing, sport. The honest trade-off is size. Browsing London listings on 4 September 2026, the events surfacing first showed 74, 100, 163, 187, 228, 234, 239, 263, 312 and 546 attendees. Small groups exist, but a big room asks you to do the introducing.
- Bumble For Friends. Profiles and mutual matching, then a chat. It is free to match and message. The documented weakness for a short stay is that it produces conversations rather than plans, and a conversation that turns into a coffee in three weeks is no use if you fly home on Friday.
- Eatwith. A marketplace of host-cooked dinners in the host's home, plus cooking classes and food tours, in more than 130 countries. You are booking a specific host's evening rather than being matched with peers. It is a genuinely different night out and often a better one if food is the actual interest.
One worth knowing about
222 comes up constantly in alternative lists and it is a good product. It runs in seventeen markets and London is one of them, so it is a real option here, and it is free to download from the UK App Store. Its centre of gravity is American, so the London calendar is smaller than the New York or Los Angeles one. If you want a larger second venue after the meal rather than one table all evening, it is the closer fit.
If you are in London for work, the question is slightly different
Most of these are built for somebody who lives in the city and is building a social life over months. That is not the same problem as eleven nights in a hotel with a full diary of days and an empty diary of evenings, and it changes which trade-offs matter.
Three things matter more on a short stay than they do for a resident. Whether you can pay for the two evenings you actually want rather than a period you will not use. Whether the thing happens on a fixed night you can plan a work diary around, rather than whenever a chat turns into a plan. And what happens when a client dinner appears at 4pm and your evening disappears, which is a refund question and worth checking on whichever one you pick.
That is the situation KF.Social is built for, and it is also why we only do London: 15 pounds a seat, a table of six, the restaurant about six hours before and the table about an hour before, when the group chat opens. If you want to see what is on, look at the tables coming up in London. If you would rather compare us directly with Timeleft first, we wrote an honest side-by-side, and what Timeleft actually costs covers the pricing question on its own.