Terms of service

Lineup is rated 17+, and you must be at least 17 years old to create an account or use the service. Before you see any content, you enter your date of birth - an actual date, not a checkbox.

If you are under 21, you are not locked out, but the service is a different, smaller thing: you can see venue hours, addresses, and event listings only. Drink-special content, cover pricing, crowd reporting, and deal redemption are hidden until the birthday on file says otherwise. This gating is automatic and is not something support can toggle for you.

Entering a false date of birth is a violation of these terms and grounds for permanent account termination. Bars card at the door; Lineup does not get anyone past an ID check and never claims to. See the age policy for the full picture.

You sign in with a phone number or Apple ID and pick a handle. Real names are never required - that is a design decision, not an oversight. Handles must be 3–20 characters, can't impersonate a venue or another person, and are screened against a blocklist.

One account per person. You are responsible for activity on your account, so don't share access to it. Your date of birth is collected once at the age gate, is immutable afterward, and is never displayed to anyone - including you.

There is no paid tier for students. Lineup is free on the consumer side, and status in the app (verification, reliability, badges) is earned, never bought.

The whole product rests on honest reports, so most of this section is one idea: report only what you can see, from where you actually are. Reports are verified against your device location server-side, and attempting to spoof location, coordinate false reports, or otherwise inflate or deflate a venue's numbers is the fastest way to lose your account. Accounts that file bad-faith reports first lose reporting weight, then lose access.

You also agree not to:

- use Lineup to harass, stalk, or track anyone (friendship is mutual by design, and blocking is total);
- scrape, resell, or republish venue data, crowd data, or any other part of the service;
- probe, overload, or interfere with the service or its anti-abuse systems;
- use the service for any unlawful purpose, including underage drinking.

Rate limits (report cooldowns, nightly caps, redemption caps) are part of the product, not obstacles to route around.

Venue pages combine information supplied by the venue (hours, specials, events, photos), information gathered from public sources, and live crowd data derived from user reports. We correct errors fast, but we do not guarantee that any of it is accurate at the moment you read it. Covers change, kitchens close, DJs cancel. The door has the final say, always.

Venues cannot report their own crowd level, cannot edit their heat data, and cannot pay to appear busier. A venue that believes its data is wrong can flag it for human review. Crowd data shown on Lineup is our derived estimate and is provided as-is.

Specials and deals on Lineup are offers made by venues, not by us. Venues set the terms, the quantities, and the windows, and they may change or pull a deal at any time. A deal appearing in the app is not a guarantee that it will be honored - though a venue that routinely fails to honor its posted deals doesn't stay on the map long.

Coded deals generate a single-use code valid for 10 minutes. One redemption per deal per night, a maximum of three coded redemptions per night across all venues, and venues may set their own caps. Every redemption is 21+ and requires ID at the door. Sharing screenshots of codes doesn't work - the code carries a rotating visual element for exactly that reason.

Photos you add to a venue page or a rally remain yours. By posting, you give Lineup a non-exclusive license to display them in the product surfaces you posted them to. Venue photos posted by users expire at the nightly boundary (5am) by design.

The service itself - the app, the site, the heat model, the derived crowd data, the design, the name - belongs to Lineup. These terms give you a personal, non-transferable right to use it, and nothing more.

Lineup tells you what the night looks like. What you do with the night is up to you. We are not responsible for the conduct of venues, their staff, their patrons, or your friends; for the accuracy of any crowd estimate; or for anything that happens on premises we don't own, which is all of them.

The service is provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of any kind, express or implied. To the fullest extent permitted by law, Lineup's total liability for any claim arising out of the service is limited to one hundred dollars or the amount you paid us in the past twelve months, whichever is greater - and since the consumer product is free, plan on the hundred.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited under applicable law. And the part we mean most sincerely: pace yourself, watch your people, and use Get Home. However tonight went, end it safe.

You can delete your account at any time in Settings. Deletion is a soft delete with a 30-day recovery window, after which all personal data is permanently and irreversibly removed. Reports you submitted survive only as anonymized aggregate data, because removing them retroactively would corrupt historical venue data for everyone else.

We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these terms - location spoofing, coordinated false reporting, harassment, underage circumvention of the age gate, or abuse of the service. For report-integrity violations we usually reduce reporting weight first; for safety violations we don't.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute arising out of these terms or the service will be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Erie County, New York, and you consent to their jurisdiction. Buffalo is where the product lives; it's where the disputes live too.

We'll update these terms as the product grows. For material changes, we'll notify you in the app before the new terms take effect; continuing to use Lineup after that date means you accept them. The “last updated” date at the top always reflects the current version.

Questions, complaints, or something we got wrong: hello@lineup-app.org. A person reads it.