Nobody wants to collect cash at the door of their dinner party, but feeding a group of friends can be expensive. A new startup wants to stop this conundrum from leading to fewer dinner parties.

The site, Zokos, gives guests a way to pitch into dinner party costs without an awkward exchange of cash.

Using the platform, hosts can set a minimum and maximum number of guests they'd like to invite to dinner, send invitations through Facebook or email, and request that each guest contribute a certain amount to the cost of the party. RSVPed guests' PayPal accounts are only charged if the minimum number of guests are reached, similar to the way Kickstarter funders only pay when a funding goal is reached. Zokos charges $.30 plus a 3% fee for each transaction.

"It's not really crowdfunding, it's friend funding," co-founder Christopher Kieran says.

Kieran and his co-founders first hatched the idea of a dinner-party-promoting system while in graduate school at Yale. They were members of Veggie Dinners, a 300-person club in which each member hosts one dinner party per month in exchange for the right to attend other members' dinners.

When they founded Zokos, their original idea was to bring Veggie Dinners to the masses. The product quickly evolved into a way to share dinner party costs, however, when it became apparent that a group-based system was hard to scale.

Zokos's current site retains the likelihood of meeting new people that was inherent in a dinner party club of 300 people by allowing invited guests to invite their friends. There's also a public dinner party option that lets you open your tablet to the world, but Kieran says that it's taking off in San Francisco "and nowhere else."

If you're planning a party, there are plenty of established site such as Evite and Paperless Post that you can use to manage invitations and RSVPs. The real value proposition of Zokos is making hosting less expensive, and if what prevents people from hosting dinner parties is the cost rather than the hassle of cooking and cleaning, it's a good one.

"I think the potluck is a solution to the same problem that we’re dealing with, which is that it’s expensive to host a party," Kieran says. "It's the new potluck."







Image courtesy of iStockphoto, RapidEye