Planning a kid's birthday in Philly starts the same way every time. You open a dozen tabs, find a place that looks about right, and then spend twenty minutes trying to work out whether the price on the page is real. Often it isn't. Some of those pages haven't been touched in two years, a few of the places quietly stopped doing parties and never said so, and the only way to find out is to call and wait for someone to pick up.
We got tired of it, so we did the calling. All of it.
One rule
We made a page with every birthday party venue we could find around Philadelphia, and it follows one rule: a place only shows up if we have checked on it recently. Not found it once and left it sitting there, but actually looked, at the venue's own page, and written down the date.
That comes to 382 places right now. Each one tells you what it costs to start, how many kids it fits, and whether food comes with it. If we could not confirm a place, it is not on there.
“If we couldn't confirm it, it isn't on there. That's the point of the page, not a hole in it.”
Keeping it honest
Checking 382 places once is a long weekend. Keeping them checked is the real job, and that falls to Orbit, the little satellite we introduced back in July. Orbit goes through the list a few times a day and reads what each place is saying about itself.
If a venue goes quiet, it comes off the page. If a price changes, it gets fixed. And every entry shows the day we last checked it, so you are never looking at a number and wondering how old it is. Right now the oldest one on there is from August 14th.
We also just ask them
Reading a venue's website only gets you so far. So we started emailing the places themselves to ask whether what we have is still right, and when someone writes back to say yes, that listing gets a check mark next to it.
That check mark is the strongest thing on the page. It means the answer came from the people who actually run the place, not from us reading their site and doing our best. We are early on this, though, and most of what you see is still checked by us rather than confirmed by them. We would rather tell you that plainly than let a little badge suggest more than it should.
For the questions we get asked most:
- Under $300, which is 219 of them
- Food included, so you are not also ordering pizza
- In the city, if you would rather not drive
Built to be passed around
Most of what we make is meant to be visited. This one is meant to be forwarded.
There is a share button at the top of every list that opens the normal share sheet on your phone, so it is one tap into a group chat or a neighborhood Facebook group. That is honestly how most people will find it, and we would rather build for that than pretend everyone shows up through Google.
There is also a save button that turns the whole thing into a PDF. Print it, email it, or send it to the parent who never clicks links. You pick what goes in it, either just the part you are looking at or the entire list, and you see exactly what you are about to get before you make it. Every page carries the dates and says where it came from, so it still makes sense three weeks later when somebody passes it along again.
If you are the sort of person who wants the raw data, that is there too, and it is what lets AI assistants quote these lists without making things up.
What isn't there yet
There is a second list coming for kids' classes, and it is not ready. We know about 398 of them, and Orbit only started working through them this week. It has done 39 so far, which is about a tenth.
A class turns out to be a harder thing to check than a venue. A studio's website stays up all year whether or not you can actually sign up, so the page loading tells you nothing worth knowing. What you need is which session is running and when it starts, and plenty of places never print that anywhere. Of the first 39 we looked at, only 6 gave us their dates outright.
So it will be a few more weeks. The page goes up when the classes are checked, and not before.
The list lives at tinyjawns.com/lists. It's $0 for parents and there's no account to make.