Four steps from group chat to locked date

No accounts, no downloads, no email addresses. One four-letter code goes into the group chat and everything happens in the browser everyone already has open.

Reading time: about 5 minutes

dontflake.lol exists to answer one question — when are we actually doing this? — and then to make that answer stick. The whole flow is deliberately linear: each step unlocks only when the previous one is genuinely finished, so a group can't drift into planning a trip nobody has a date for. Here's what each step does and why it's built that way.

Before you start: name the plan and the group size

Starting a plan asks for three things: what you're planning (“Summer at the lake”), your name or your crew's name, and how many people or households are joining. That last number is the one that matters. It's the target the tool counts up to, and it's the reason the calendar stays locked until everyone is actually in.

Count households rather than individuals if your group travels in units — a couple or a family with one shared calendar is one decision-maker, and counting them as four makes the gathering step impossible to complete.

You get a four-letter invite code and a share link with a ready-made message you can paste straight into the chat. Nothing is booked, nothing is charged, and nobody needs to sign up for anything.

Step 1 · Gather — the no-flake pledge

Everyone who opens the link previews the plan first: what it is, who's already in, and how many spots are left. Joining requires a press-and-hold — the “no-flake pledge” — rather than a single tap.

The press-and-hold is not decoration. A one-tap join is a group thumbs-up, and group thumbs-up are worth very little: in a crowd, nobody feels individually responsible for the yes. Holding a button for a beat is a deliberate, individual act of commitment, and it's the cheapest available version of the thing that actually reduces dropouts — an explicit personal confirmation rather than a passive one.

Each crew that joins gets its own emoji and colour, assigned once and fixed from then on, so the group can see at a glance who's in and who's still missing. The calendar stays locked until the last spot is filled.

Step 2 · Dates — blind availability, then a locked window

Everyone marks the days they can make across the next few months. Crucially, nobody sees anybody else's picks until every crew has submitted.

This is the most important design decision in the product. When availability is collected publicly and in sequence, the first answer becomes an anchor and every later answer bends toward it — people soften real conflicts because being the obstacle feels rude. The date that emerges has no stated objections and two hidden ones, and those two people get called flakes a month later. Hiding the picks until the last submission removes the peer pressure and produces a far more honest map of the group's real constraints.

Once everyone's in, the overlap is revealed as the stretches of consecutive days the whole group can make. The group agrees how long the thing should be — a day trip, a weekend, a long weekend, a full week — and then locks one window. If the calendars genuinely don't intersect, you can reset and run it again over a wider stretch rather than being stuck.

The locked date can be dropped straight into everyone's real calendar as an event with a reminder the day before. A date that lives only in a chat scroll competes with everything else in that scroll and loses; a date in a calendar defends itself.

Step 3 · Spin — the wheel picks an organizer

With a date locked, someone has to have the authority to make the remaining calls. In a group of peers, nobody wants to volunteer for that: it looks like an unbounded job, it carries all the blame if the choice disappoints, and stepping up can feel like claiming status.

So the tool spins a wheel. An impersonal draw turns the role from a statement about who cares most into a chore that happened to land on someone — which is much easier to accept and much easier to hand on next time. One re-spin is available for the cases where the wheel picks someone who genuinely can't take it on.

The organizer's mandate is narrow by design: choose from options the group has already agreed are acceptable, and announce the choice as final. They aren't the boss of the trip and they shouldn't automatically become the group's bank.

Step 4 · Plan — everyone's input, one itinerary

Each crew answers a short set of questions privately: who's coming (including kids' ages, which changes the recommendations meaningfully), whether you'd rather camp, book a hotel, or go to a resort, day trip or overnight, how you'd get there, what you're into — hiking, food, museums, theme parks, nightlife, relaxing — the pace you want, a rough per-person budget, how far you're willing to travel, and one must-do wish.

Those answers are combined into a single plan: a suggested home base with the reasoning behind it, a few places to stay at different price points, how to get there, things to do that match what the group actually said it wanted, where to eat, and a loose day-by-day shape. Loose is intentional — minute-by-minute itineraries make people feel managed and fall apart at the first delay.

The plan step works whether or not an AI model is configured for the site; if it isn't, the same inputs produce a plan built from your group's answers directly, so the button never dead-ends.

What the tool deliberately doesn't do

• No accounts or passwords. Your session is just the name you typed, kept in your own browser. Nothing to sign up for and nothing to remember.
• No bookings and no payments. Nothing is reserved and no card is ever asked for. The plan is a decision, and you book it wherever you normally would.
• No notifications or email. We don't collect addresses or phone numbers. The group chat you're already in is a better notifier than anything we'd build.
• No ads inside the planning flow. The tool itself stays clean; the only pages carrying ads are the written guides.

Coming back to a plan

Reopening the site shows the plans your name belongs to, so you can jump back into any of them. Anyone with the four-letter code and the link can look at the plan and join if there's a spot left, which is the intended behaviour for something you paste into a group chat — but it also means the code is the only thing standing between the plan and whoever has it, so share it with the group rather than posting it publicly.

The method behind all of this is written up in more detail in the guides — start with how to find a date everyone can make.