A free potluck sign up sheet for Thanksgiving
and Friendsgiving that is just a link.

A free Thanksgiving potluck sign up sheet can be a single link: each guest opens it on their phone, picks a dish, and sees what everyone else is bringing, with no account to create and no ads on the page. You decide the slots, say three mains, six sides and two people on plates and ice, and a category that fills up stops being an option.

This guide builds that sheet as one HTML file. Claude writes it from the prompt below, Hostus hosts it on a link, and the same page works for Friendsgiving, the office potluck in December or a block party in July. Guests see names and dishes. Their emails and notes go only to you.

What it looks like

Here is one, live: Friendsgiving at Maya and Jonah's. The hosts and the guests are fictional, but the sheet is real: sign up for a dish and it appears for everyone who opens the link, which you can check in a second browser or on your phone.

The hosts cover the turkey and the gravy and ask for the rest in five categories, each with a number of spots: Mains 3, Sides 6, Desserts 4, Drinks 4, Plates & ice 2. Each category reads like "Sides · 4 of 6", with the list of who brings what underneath and small diet tags (vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, contains nuts), so the cousin with the nut allergy knows which pie to skip. When a category is full, the menu shows "Mains (full)" and nobody can pick it. Under the button, one line says what stays private: your email and note go only to the hosts.

Why the spreadsheet, the printable and the group chat fail

Every potluck fails the same two ways: two people bring pumpkin pie, and nobody brings ice. Both come from one problem. Guests cannot see what is already covered at the moment they decide.

• The group chat. "I'll bring dessert" scrolls away under forty messages about parking. Three people say dessert. Nobody says cups.
• The shared spreadsheet. Everyone needs edit access, so anyone can type over someone else's row, and somebody always sorts a column. On a phone it is a small window onto a big grid.
• The printable PDF. It works in an office break room where people walk past it. For a dinner at your place it lives on one fridge, and the guests see it on the day.

A sign-up sheet has three jobs: one list everyone sees, slots that fill up, and a way to stop when the table is full. A page on a link does all three.

The prompt

With the Hostus connector on in Claude, this writes the page and publishes it in one turn. It asks for the same data design as the demo.

Make me a potluck sign-up sheet for our Friendsgiving: Saturday 21 November, 5 pm, at Maya and Jonah's. We cook the turkey and the gravy.

Categories and slots: Mains 3, Sides 6, Desserts 4, Drinks 4, Plates & ice 2.

The sign-up is a plain <form name="potluck" method="post"> with these fields: name (required), dish (required), category (a select with the five categories, required), diet (optional tags: vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, contains nuts; send the picked tags as one comma-separated field named diet), email (optional) and note (optional, a message to the hosts). Mark name, dish, category and diet with data-publico. Do not mark email or note.

The page reads the sign-ups back with the hostus.data SDK: const { data } = window.hostus; data.watch("form:potluck", render). For each category show "Sides · 4 of 6" and the list of who brings what, with the diet tags. When a category is full, disable its option in the select and add "(full)". Count in the page, from the items.

Treat every value as untrusted: textContent only, strings only, cut long values, unknown categories go to "Other". watch returns at most 200 items, oldest first: say so if the list reaches 200. Show "Nobody has signed up yet. Be the first." when empty, and "Open the hosted link to see who's bringing what" when window.hostus is missing.

No localStorage, no backend, no key in the page. One HTML file, mobile first, warm autumn colors, sober. Under the button: "Your email and note go only to the hosts." Then publish it to Hostus and give me the link.

The page is born private. Before you send the link to the group, switch it to public in the Hostus dashboard; the connector does not change visibility. Email-gated also works: each guest types an email before the page opens, still with no account, and you see who came. Hostus does not check the address; the link is what lets them in.

Change the date, the names and the slots and it is your potluck. For the office, swap Plates & ice for Serving spoons; for a block party, add Grill. Each new version goes up on the same link, and as long as the form keeps the name potluck, the sign-ups already in stay on the sheet.

Names are public, emails are not

The sign-up is a plain form. On Hostus, any <form method="post"> with named fields stores each submission on the document: no action URL, no form service, no key in the page. Because the page also uses the hostus.data SDK, it can read its own responses back as a collection called form:potluck.

<form name="potluck" method="post">
  <input name="name" data-publico required>
  <input name="dish" data-publico required>
  <select name="category" data-publico required>...</select>
  <input type="hidden" name="diet" data-publico>
  <input type="email" name="email">     <!-- hosts only -->
  <textarea name="note"></textarea>   <!-- hosts only -->
  <button>Sign me up</button>
</form>

const { data } = window.hostus;
data.watch("form:potluck", render);  // name, dish, category, diet

The data-publico attribute is the privacy model, and the server enforces it; nothing is merely hidden on screen. A guest who reads the sheet receives only the fields marked public: name, dish, category and diet. The email and the note never reach their browser, and a value that looks like an email address is held back even in a public field, so the guest who types an email in the name box does not publish it. You, the host, see every field in the Responses tab and can export it as CSV.

Guests cannot edit or delete each other's lines from the page, because form responses are read-only to it. The counting happens in the page, from the sign-ups themselves, so nothing is stored twice and nothing drifts.

Notifications, and closing the sheet after dinner

The form settings live on the document, so you change them in the dashboard, or by asking Claude through the connector, without touching the file.

• Notifications. An email to you on every sign-up, one daily summary, or nothing.
• A thank-you line. A success message of up to 200 characters, plain text, shown in place of the form: "Thanks! Park on the street, the driveway is for the oven."
• A cap. A limit on the number of responses, if the whole sheet should stop at, say, 19 sign-ups. Full categories close on their own anyway.
• Close it. After dinner, close the form. The page stays up, the list stays readable, and the form says it no longer takes sign-ups. Next year, make a new page.

Spam filtering is on by default (a honeypot field, a per-IP limit and a spam score), and anything flagged goes to the Spam tab, not the sheet.

Hostus first, then the sign-up sites: which one to pick

Hostus. Best if you want the sheet to be a page you own, with no ads and no app for guests. Claude writes it, Hostus hosts it on a link, guests sign up from their phones without an account, everyone sees who brings what, and full categories close themselves. Emails and notes stay with you. The free plan has no clock, asks for no card and includes 100 form responses a month across your account.

SignUpGenius. Pick it if you want reminders and payment collection. Its cost page describes a free plan with no expiration and no credit card, says there is "no limit on how many sign ups you can create", and lists automatic reminders; its help center says participants do not need an account. Ad-free pages start at its Starter plan, so free sign-ups show ads. Prices are not on that page, and which plan collects payments is a question for their site.

SignUp.com. Pick it if you want a dedicated sign-up service with automatic reminders. Its own blog describes a free potluck sign-up sheet on a link where participants choose a dish from their phone, with reminders sent for you. Whether guests need an account, and what the free plan shows, check their site.

Google Sheets. Pick it if your group already works in a shared Drive and trusts each other with edit access. It is flexible and the data is yours. It has no slots that close, anyone who can edit can change or delete any row, and on a phone it is cramped.

Google Forms. Pick it if you only need the answers to reach you. It collects replies for the person who made it; for showing guests what is taken, check their site.

A printable PDF. Pick it for the office potluck, where the sheet hangs in the break room and everyone walks past it twice a day. No setup and no phone, and no way to check it from home.

Side by side

SignUpGenius and SignUp.com facts were read on each vendor's own site on 2 November 2026 and change without notice. Where a cell says "check their site", the vendor did not state it on the pages we read, and we would rather send you there than guess. The Google and printable rows describe how a shared spreadsheet, a form and a sheet of paper behave, not a price list.

Good to know before you switch

Hostus does not email your guests. No reminders and no confirmation email: a guest sees the thank-you line on the page, and that is it. If your crowd needs a nudge two days before, post it in the group chat, or use SignUpGenius or SignUp.com, which send reminders. There are no payments either.

The page carries our name. Every page, free and paid, has a small "Published with Hostus" pill in the bottom-right corner, and a "Form by Hostus" line appears under the thank-you message. The link is your-name.hostus.page: you can rename that first part, but Hostus does not serve pages on a domain of your own. The file is yours and any host will serve it, though the live list only works on Hostus. Pages on Hostus carry a noindex tag and do not show up in Google, which is what you want for a dinner at your house.

The free plan counts responses. 100 form responses a month across your account, 20 documents and 2 MB in total. Past 100 in a month, new sign-ups are stored but held, hidden until you upgrade, so they do not appear on the sheet; the guest's form never breaks. Paid is $9.99 a month or $49.99 a year, with unlimited responses. The page reads up to 200 sign-ups and says so if it gets there.

A few habits. Test from a private window: a sign-up sent while you are logged in as the host is marked as a test and does not show on the sheet. A guest who changes dish signs up again, and you delete the old line in the Responses tab. Set the data mode to owner only in the dashboard: guests still see the sheet, and nobody but you can store anything else on the page. In per reader mode the list stays with you and guests see nothing. Opened as a file from your desktop, the page shows the form but no list.