This App Lets You Rent a Bathroom

Does legal urination sometimes feel like an impossible standard to hold yourself to? Turns out there’s an app to help you relieve yourself appropriately, even when you’re in an unfamiliar city and public restrooms are scarce. Airpnp helps users “find a clean, comfortable bathroom no matter where you are.”

Here’s how it works: The app unites people who need a bathroom with residences and businesses willing to rent out their bathrooms to people in their immediate vicinity. After the exchange, users can rate their bathroom experience. The service started in New Orleans, but is slowly spreading to other cities. For instance, here in Berkeley, California, I found two Airpnp bathrooms within a mile of my location. One cost $1 per use, the other was $1,337 (in its defense, it did call itself the best restroom in Berkeley).

In our story How to Find a Public Bathroom in the U.S., we talked about how using apps to help locate bathrooms was an emerging trend. We’re interested to see how location-aware toilet apps are taking it to the next level with this sharing-economy twist. 

(Photo: Bathroom/Shutterstock)

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