The Num community

A community, not a marketplace.

The people who know a place are the ones who put it on the map. This is where they talk: locals, the businesses on their street, and the travellers passing through — working out together how to make a town better to visit and better to live in.

Find your community
An evening market under paper lanterns
An evening market under paper lanterns
A stallholder hands a bag of fruit across the counter
A stallholder hands a bag of fruit across the counter
Shoulder to shoulder at a counter in Omoide Yokocho, Shinjuku, Tokyo
Shoulder to shoulder at a counter in Omoide Yokocho
Every town already is one

Tourism is a community. It always was.

The stallholder, the cook at the counter, the person who volunteers at the garden on Saturday. Visitors come for the place, and the place is these people. Num is built to send the money a visitor spends back to them.

Saturday Walking Street on Wua Lai Road, Chiang Mai
Saturday Walking Street on Wua Lai RoadChiang Mai
Grand Central Market, Los Angeles
Grand Central MarketLos Angeles
A Fringe performer on the Royal Mile, Edinburgh
A Fringe performer on the Royal MileEdinburgh
Stallholders at work in the Tsukiji Outer Market, Tokyo
Stallholders at work in the Tsukiji Outer MarketTokyo
A community garden volunteer day
A community garden volunteer day 
Locals browsing the food stalls at an evening market
Locals browsing the food stalls at an evening market 
A night market lit up for a festival
A night market lit up for a festival 
Boards and communities

Join the places and conversations you care about.

Every place Num covers is a community, and you can be a citizen of as many as you like: where you live, where you grew up, where you are going next. Read freely. To post, join or share a photo, sign in with a code to your email or phone. Every voice here is a real, verified person.

Boards

What people talk about, in every town.

Communities

Join one and you are a citizen of it. The first hundred are its founding citizens.
Every community

109 places, 39 countries. Find yours.

Every place Num covers has its own community: its own board, its own events, its own photographs, and its own founding citizens.

How the loop works

Nobody gets paid until somebody walks in.

Every other platform charges a local business a monthly fee to be found, then takes a cut of the guest it found them. Num charges nothing to be listed and pays the local who put the place on the map.

A traveller asks

In their own language, at any hour.

A sentence with the real constraints in it — six of us, one is eight, nothing with pork, somewhere we can walk to.

Num answers

Three real places, not a page of ads.

No business can pay to be in that answer. A person has checked the place is where Num says it is.

A guest walks in

To a local business, on a local street.

Somebody’s restaurant, somebody’s driver, somebody’s guesthouse — not whoever bought the top slot.

Only then is anything charged

Nothing for a walk-in. Nothing for a no-show.

Being listed is free and stays free. A business pays a share of a guest Num actually sent, once they turn up.

The local who signed them up earns

For two years, not a one-off fee.

A Num Expert gets a share of what Num earns from every business they bring in. They live there, so the money lands there.

And they bring the next one

Which is where the loop closes.

More places on the map means better answers, which means more guests for the street, which makes it worth another local’s time to add the next place.

Questions

How the community works.

What is the Num community?

A forum where the people who know a place talk to each other and to the people visiting it: locals, the owners of local businesses, Num Experts and travellers. Every place Num covers has its own community, with its own board, events and photos.

What does it mean to be a citizen of a community?

You joined it. The first hundred people to join a place are its founding citizens, numbered in the order they joined. It is a choice to belong, not a claim to live there, and Num never calls anyone a local because of it.

Who can post, and who checks it?

Anyone who proves an email or a phone. A person reads a new member's first post before it goes up; after that, their posts go up straight away. Reports go to a person, and three reports from different people take a post down until they have read it.

What happens to the photos I share?

Your browser makes a fresh copy of the photo before it is sent, which removes where it was taken and which camera took it. We refuse any photo that still carries that. Then a person looks at it before anybody else can see it.

Can a business pay to be on the board?

No. Selling is not allowed in posts and no place on the board can be bought. Businesses join the conversation the same way everybody does.

Is it free?

Yes. Reading, posting, joining communities and sharing photos are all free.

Ways in

Every part of a town has a door.

Business owners

Claim your place in your own words

Your hours, your languages, what you actually cook. Free to list, and it stays free.

List free → Num Experts

Sign up the places you already love

A code and a card. Sign a business up at the counter and earn from what they do through Num for two years.

Get your code → Hosts and guides

Keep your clients, and keep 100%

Num does the texting and stays out of the middle. The host doing the work keeps everything they make.

For hosts → Whole towns

Bring your association or your street

A chamber, a tourist association or a market can bring every member onto Num at once, free.

Talk to us →
Community for community

A town’s visitors should pay for the town.

Every business a local signs up is a business that hires locally, buys locally and stays open through a quiet month. That is the only growth Num is interested in. The board is new and small, and that means you would be early. Say the first thing.

Become a Num Expert
Photo credits

These are licensed photographs of real places, not pictures of Num members. When the community is ready to share its own, they will replace these.