About Potluck Planner

The story

In 2014, Seth Brasile built the first version of this app to coordinate his own family's Thanksgiving — 30-person gatherings where "who's bringing what" lived in group texts and somebody always showed up with the third potato salad. That version ran real holidays. So did the rewrite after it.

He bought potluck-planner.com in 2020, intending to release the version he was using at home. Then his second child arrived, and family came before shipping — which felt appropriate for a potluck app. Through several more restart attempts he kept expecting a better potluck tool to appear on the market. Twelve years later, it still hadn't. So in 2026 he finished it properly: the fourth rebuild, the one you're looking at.

Why dietary safety is the point

A decade of hosting big shared meals teaches you the real failure mode isn't duplicate desserts — it's the guest with a nut allergy quietly eating rolls all night because nobody could tell them what was safe. Potluck Planner treats a potluck menu as dietary-safety information: every dish carries its allergen and preparation details, visible to every guest, so the person who needs to know can actually see it.

That principle drives most of what's in the app — allergen matching, dish dietary indicators, and substitution nudges when a small change to a dish would let more people at the table eat it.

Try it on your next gathering

Create an event, share one link, and guests claim dishes in seconds — no downloads, no guest accounts. Start planning free, or see pricing.