The Great Bathroom Paywall: A New App Wants To Commodify Your Cafe’s Commode

You gotta hand it to tech companies. There no not-problem that they can’t not-solve, reinventing the wheel so as to convince you that roundness is bad and actually squares roll much better anyway (for a fee).

One such new app solves the problem of public restrooms. The problem? That they haven’t been monetized yet.

As reported by TechCrunch, Flush allows for coffee shops, restaurants, hotels, etc to rent out their restrooms to customers. (It should have been called Crappr. “App” is in the name, and I frankly don’t trust a company to build a quality product when they missed such an obvious and perfect name.) Launching at this week’s CES 2024, the new app was created by USC computer science graduate Elle Szabo “after frustrating experiences trying to find public restrooms while on a diuretic medication.”

 

“I’ll never forget the day I went out for a big dinner and we all piled into the car to go hang out in Pasadena, where I knew there’d be no open bathrooms,” Szabo told TechCrunch in an email interview. “We’d been driving for a couple minutes when I had to force the car to stop at the nearest building—which in this case was a hospital! If being on this medication was a problem for me, I wondered how many other people it was a problem for.”

Admittedly, having to pee a lot sounds awful, particularly when stuck in Los Angeles traffic. One might reasonably wonder: why not stop at a gas station? But there’s no elegance to that solution, no je ne sais quoi to be monetized. The real answer here is an app that allows businesses to charge up to $10 per five-minute sesh.

(For $10 I would expect a half-hour, minimum.)

With Flush, users can find and book restroom time in participating nearby locations. There’s even an Uber-style rating system for users that allows providers to not accept any guests who act crappy. Szabo is touting Flush as a new revenue stream—a profit stream, or “stream of p” as it’s known in tech—for coffee shops without increasing overhead as well as “a unique means for attracting new customers without any extra marketing.” The founder goes as far as to tell TechCrunch that Flush could “fix the distribution of bathrooms to people,” which is Michelin Star tech speak word salad, frankly.

Far be it for me to tell a coffee shop how to make money. It’s tough out there for cafes so any extra bit of revenue you can scrounge up will go a long way. But here’s the real question: is the revenue-sharing app version of a “Restroom is for customers only” sign actually better?

Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.