Cuculi vs Placelore
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Cuculi
This app facilitates social dining by connecting users for shared meal experiences. It streamlines reservations, ordering, bill splitting, and cashless payments for a more convenient and enjoyable dining outing.
- Social dining platform
- All-in-one reservation
- Order management
- Bill splitting
- Cashless payment
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Dine with friends. Meet new people. Share the table. Cuculi makes dining easier and more social — whether you are planning dinner with friends, joining a Social Table, or discovering restaurants and experiences nearby. Use Cuculi to create tables, invite others, order, pay, split bills, and connect through real-life dining moments. DINE WITH FRIENDS Create a Private Table for your friends, family, coworkers, or community. Invite your group, choose where to dine, and make the whole experience smoother from start to finish. JOIN SOCIAL TABLES Want to meet new people? Join Social Tables hosted by people in your community and connect naturally over food and conversation. HOST YOUR OWN TABLE Create a Social Table, bring people together, and host dining experiences around restaurants, interests, or shared moments. ORDER, PAY & SPLIT BILLS Cuculi makes dining simple with ordering, payments, and bill splitting, so everyone can focus on enjoying the table. DISCOVER RESTAURANTS & EXPERIENCES Find restaurants, dining opportunities, and real-life experiences happening around you. BUILT FOR REAL-LIFE CONNECTION Cuculi is more than a restaurant app. It helps people gather, dine, and connect — whether they already know each other or are meeting for the first time. Go out more. Dine better. Share the table. Start with Cuculi.
Placelore
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Placelore is a private place journal for your real life. It runs quietly in the background, notices when you've actually settled somewhere, and turns each stay into a place you can name, revisit, and write about. No check-ins. No feed. No friends list. Just your own log of where you've been. WHAT IT DOES • Detects places automatically from how long you stay, not from what's nearby. • Lets you rename, recategorize, or merge places so the log matches how you actually think about them. • Attaches journal entries and photos to each place — a quick note from a coffee shop, a longer entry from a trip. • Counts visits and tracked time so you can see your real-world patterns over a week, a month, or longer. • Shows your day on a map: the places you stopped, the path between them, and how long each stay lasted. • Sends gentle milestone notifications when a place reaches 5, 10, 25, 50, or 100 visits. • Categorizes places by type — Restaurant, Cafe, Gym, Park, and more — using Apple Maps, with custom categories you can add yourself. WHY IT'S DIFFERENT Most location apps want to broadcast where you are. Placelore is the opposite: it's a logbook you keep for yourself. The dwell-based detection means you only get places you actually spent time at, not every storefront you walked past. The journal and photo attachments turn raw location history into something worth looking back on. PRIVACY BY DEFAULT • All data is stored on your device. There is no Placelore server. • No accounts, no sign-in, no analytics SDKs, no advertising identifiers. • Your places, visits, photos, and journal entries never leave your iPhone unless you explicitly export them. • Background location is used only to detect dwell time. You can pause tracking for 1, 4, or 24 hours from inside the app. • You can delete every place, visit, photo, and journal entry from Settings at any time. CONTROL • Set the minimum stay duration that counts as a real visit (default: 30 minutes). • Pause and resume tracking whenever you want. • Export your raw location samples as CSV for your own analysis. • Delete individual places or wipe everything from Settings. REQUIREMENTS • iPhone running iOS 17 or later. • "Always" location permission for passive background detection. • Camera and Photos permissions only if you choose to attach pictures. Placelore is for people who want to remember their own life, quietly. If that's you, give it a try.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is update cadence: Placelore at every 3 days against Cuculi's monthly. Cuculi's advantage is device support (3 vs 1) and iOS requirement (15.1 vs 17.0). On price, ads and in-app purchases there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
Cuculi ships an update monthly, Placelore every 3 days. The most recent releases landed on September 10, 2026 and September 21, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Cuculi | Placelore |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.9 (140 ratings) — better | — |
| Positive reviews | 98.1% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 140 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Monthly | Every 3 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPhone |
| Requires iOS | 15.1 — better | 17.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 141 MB | 2 MB |
| Age rating | 17+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Cuculi Inc | Yucheng Hu |
Bugs and requests
Cuculi
Reported bugs
2 issues- App crashes when organizing tables
- Loses work due to crashes
Requested features
4 requests- Expand to other states
- More restaurant selections
- Dark mode option
- Advanced analytics dashboard
Placelore
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
Cuculi
No in-app purchases
Placelore
No in-app purchases





