snipeseatsCreating a snipe
Tell SnipeSeats which reservation to watch for.
Search for the restaurant you want under Venues, open it, and fill in the Create Snipe Request form: date range, party size, and preferred times. SnipeSeats then watches that venue continuously and books the instant a matching slot opens — including cancellations and released holds that never show up if you're refreshing Resy manually.
Finding venues
Under Venues, search by name, city, cuisine, or platform. Results come from a local venue catalog that's synced ahead of time, so search stays instant even with a slow connection.
If the venue you want isn't showing up, click Sync venues to pull the latest catalog. Still missing? Use the Search live link that appears under your results to query the platform directly instead of the local catalog.
Once you've found the right venue, open it to continue to Create Snipe Request.
Adding a venue by URL
Some venues — private events, pop-ups, newly listed restaurants — won't turn up in search or live search yet. If you already have the venue's page link, paste it straight into the search box instead of a keyword. SnipeSeats recognizes it's a URL and shows That looks like a venue URL with a platform picker underneath.
Pick which platform the link is from (for example Resy) and SnipeSeats fetches the venue directly from that platform and adds it to your catalog. You're taken straight to its detail page, where you can continue to Create Snipe Request as usual.
A Resy venue URL looks like https://resy.com/cities/<city>/venues/<venue-slug> — copy it straight from your browser's address bar while on the venue's Resy page. Only platforms your plan grants access to are offered as options.
Setting intervals
This section covers Resy, where interval tuning is fully live today. OpenTable and other platforms are coming soon — snipes on those platforms poll on a fixed schedule for now, with no interval customization yet.
How the default schedule works
Every snipe polls Resy on an automatic schedule out of the box — you don't have to configure anything. The interval is recalculated continuously from two things: how close your reservation date is, and whether the current moment is inside the top-of-hour peak window.
- Peak window (any hour, minute 55–59 or 0–4) — every 10 seconds. Restaurants overwhelmingly release cancellations and unclaimed holds right on the hour, so SnipeSeats polls fastest exactly when it matters most, regardless of how far out the date is.
- Date is today or tomorrow, outside peak — every 20 seconds.
- Date is within the next 7 days, outside peak — every 60 seconds.
- Date is more than 7 days out, outside peak — every 3 minutes.
The further out a reservation is, the less often tables actually turn over for it, so polling it every few seconds would just waste requests without improving your odds. As the date gets closer, the schedule automatically tightens on its own.
These numbers aren't arbitrary — the 10-second peak floor was set from a real production capture of Resy's own search traffic (271 requests against a single venue/date/party-size target, 100% successful, zero rate-limit responses), and it's the fastest interval confirmed safe to sustain. SnipeSeats also caps how many Resy requests it sends per cycle across all your snipes combined, so polling stays inside limits that don't get an account rate-limited or flagged, even when several snipes are active at once.
Custom polling windows
The default schedule is a general-purpose guess — it doesn't know anything about a specific restaurant's habits. If you happen to know exactly when a venue tends to release tables (say, a restaurant that drops cancellations at 9am sharp, or opens its books for a new date every day at noon), you can tell SnipeSeats to poll hard right at that time instead of relying on the generic schedule.
Open a snipe's detail page, find Customize polling, and switch it on. You can then define up to 5 time windows, each with its own start time, end time, and check frequency in seconds (10 seconds minimum, matching the same floor the default schedule uses). Windows can't overlap, and times are in the venue's local timezone.
One tradeoff: outside of any configured window, that snipe stops polling entirely rather than falling back to the default schedule. So a custom schedule only pays off when you're confident about the timing — if you're not sure when a venue releases tables, the default schedule is the safer choice.