Who runs this site
I'm Abdullah, and NearbyToday is the events site I built for the community I've called home since 2007.
I moved to Waterloo eighteen years ago and spent a decade at BlackBerry, leaving in 2017. My family is here — my kid is growing up in Waterloo Region — so figuring out weekend plans has been a running project of mine for a long time. The frustrating part was that finding out what was happening meant checking half a dozen different sites: the City of Waterloo calendar, THEMUSEUM, Explore Waterloo Region, the university events pages, Ontario Parks, plus scattered posts on Facebook and Instagram. There was no single place that pulled it all together and let me filter by "free," "this weekend," or "within 10 km of home."
So I built one.
NearbyToday started as a personal tool. It grew into a Waterloo Region events guide, then expanded across Ontario, and now covers the major Canadian cities. Every source I pull from is a real public one — municipal calendars, tourism boards, library systems, university events, Ontario Parks, and Ticketmaster — and I add new sources based on what I'd actually use as a resident. The site is free to browse and always will be. If a paid listing appears, it's clearly labelled as sponsored.
If you know of an event or venue I'm missing, tell me on the contact page. I read every message.
— Abdullah, Waterloo, ON
Credentials at a glance
Location
Waterloo, Ontario — resident since 2007
Prior experience
BlackBerry (2007–2017)
Site launched
NearbyToday, 2026
Coverage today
60+ event sources, major Canadian cities
How this site is built and maintained
NearbyToday pulls events directly from official public sources — municipal event calendars (Toronto, Cambridge, Waterloo, Hamilton, Mississauga, Kingston, Niagara Falls, and more), tourism board feeds (Tourism London, Tourism Burlington, Visit Oakville, Explore Waterloo Region), public library event systems (Cambridge, Edmonton, Vancouver, and Kitchener), Ontario Parks programming, university public-events feeds, and Ticketmaster for concerts and sports.
Each source is fetched at its origin — not through a scraper reseller — parsed into a shared format, de-duplicated across sources, tagged free where the source indicates it, and cached with a stale-on-failure fallback so the site keeps working when a single upstream feed goes down. Every event's ticket or info button links back to the original source so you can verify details and buy tickets from the venue directly. Sources are added and removed manually by me; I audit the feed roster every quarter.
Restaurant and food data is curated against Google Places and each city's own business directory. Paid listings are labelled with a "Sponsored" badge and clearly separated from editorial recommendations.
Editorial policy
Free to browse, always. The site does not charge readers, and there is no paywall.
Paid placements are labelled. Businesses can pay for featured listings via the Promote page, but every paid listing carries a visible "Sponsored" badge, and no amount of payment can influence editorial event coverage or how event feeds are ranked.
Corrections. If something on this site is wrong or outdated, tell me and I'll fix it. Most corrections go live within 24 hours.
Privacy. Read the full privacy policy. In short: I don't sell your data; the site uses location only for distance-sort (never stored server-side) and standard analytics for traffic measurement.