About
Find out if a cafe is good to work in, before you walk in.
Google Maps will tell you that a cafe exists and that people like the coffee. It won't tell you whether you can sit there for three hours with a laptop. That is the one question Work&Sip tries to answer.
The questions nobody answers
If you have ever turned up somewhere new with a laptop, you know the drill. You dig through blogs, Reddit, Maps and Instagram for the answers to a few very specific questions. Do they allow laptops? Is the wifi any good? Are there outlets? Will I find a seat? Can I take a call? Is it okay to stay a while? Review sites don't ask any of that, so if the answers exist at all, they are buried in the middle of somebody's three-star review.
How it works
Every cafe on Work&Sip answers the same eight questions about working there, and people answer them with a plain yes or no. We add the votes up and show you the share who said yes, question by question, plus one number for the cafe as a whole. That's it. No stars for the coffee, no essays, nothing to interpret. The number next to a cafe's name is its net votes: every yes, on any of the questions, minus every no. The thumb beside it points down when there are more no votes than yes, so a thumb down and 3 means three more no than yes. It turns caramel once there are more yes votes than no, and the more people vote, the further it can go either way.
An example, not a real cafe
- Would you recommend this place for working?9 of 10
- Is it laptop friendly?7 of 8
- Is the wifi fast?2 of 3
- Are there many wall outlets?1 of 1
- Was it easy to find a seat?1 of 4
- Is it quiet enough to focus?No votes yet
- Could you take a meeting here?No votes yet
- Are the prices fair for what you get?3 of 3
Where the answers come from
Most of them come from people who have sat, worked and sipped in the cafe and told us what they found.
To get a city started, we also read what people have written in their Google reviews about working there. When a review mentions the wifi or the outlets, we count it as a vote and show you the sentence it came from, with the reviewer's name and a link to the review. We also read what cafes say on their own websites, and what people have written about them in articles and on Reddit. We count those as votes too, but we don't quote them.
Cafes change. The wifi gets fixed, laptops get banned at weekends, the sofas disappear. So a vote is one person's current answer, and they can change it whenever they find things different. A sentence from a Google review is shown, and counted, for a few weeks at a time and only while Google still returns it. What you see is what people say now, not what one of them said two years ago.
Nothing is paid for and nothing is made up. If a cafe has no votes yet, it says so.
One city at a time
We are starting in Stockholm, where we live and work, with about 640 cafes. We would rather do one city properly than put empty pins on a map of fifty. If you want Work&Sip in your city, tell us. When enough people ask for the same place, we open it, and we'll email you when yours is ready.
Buy me a coffee
If Work&Sip has saved you a wasted trip across town, you can buy me a coffee. It keeps the site running, and it buys nothing on it.
