A $32 order placed through a third-party app can cost you $8–$10 in commission before you've cooked a single ingredient. A phone that rings unanswered during the Friday rush is a to-go order that goes to the taqueria down the block instead. We build commission-free online ordering, reservation and waitlist tools, staff scheduling and reporting that puts the margin back where it belongs — with the kitchen that made the food.
Free 30-minute ordering & operations review · No commission on your own site · English & Spanish
One taqueria or six locations, the same three problems eat the day: orders, people and the phone.
Most independent restaurants in the Twin Cities run on a stack that was never designed as a stack: a POS for the register, three or four delivery apps each with their own tablet and their own menu, a paper reservation book or a group text for the schedule, and a punch card taped to the register for loyalty. Every one of those pieces works fine in isolation. None of them talk to each other, and every disconnect costs either money or a guest.
The commission math is the clearest example. A restaurant that does $40,000 a month through delivery apps at a blended 25% commission is handing over roughly $10,000 a month — enough to cover a full-time line cook, several weeks of produce, or the down payment on a second location. Owners rarely see that number written down in one place, because it's split across four separate app dashboards.
The second cost is invisible until you count missed calls. During a dinner rush, the person who could answer the phone is bussing a table or expediting a ticket, and a caller who hits voicemail twice does not call a third time — they order somewhere else. Reservations booked on paper create the same blind spot from the other direction: no record of no-shows, no waitlist text, no way to see tonight's cover count without walking to the host stand.
We build the connective layer without asking you to replace the POS your team already knows: a commission-free ordering site linked to your kitchen, a reservation and waitlist system with text confirmations, a schedule your staff can see from their phone, and per-location reporting on food cost and labor. Read more about how we approach that build in general on our custom business software page.
Everything on this page is the same engineering practice described in Custom Business Software.
Every item below has a cost you can find in your own POS and app dashboards this week.
Every order through a delivery app carries a fee that comes off the top before food cost, labor or rent are even considered.
A restaurant clearing $10,000 a month through apps can be handing over $2,000–$3,000 of it in fees alone.
The host or server who could pick up is running food, and a caller who reaches voicemail rarely calls back.
To-go tickets that simply never happen, on the busiest and most profitable nights of the week.
Prices change, an item sells out, or a new dish launches, and updating five places by hand means at least two of them stay wrong.
Guests who show up expecting a price or a dish that no longer exists, and one-star reviews that mention it.
A binder at the host stand has no record of no-shows, can't text a guest when their table is ready, and can't be checked from the kitchen or the manager's phone.
Overbooked sections, guests waiting outside without a text update, and no data to plan future staffing.
Shift changes, call-offs and swap requests get buried in a text thread that half the staff has muted.
Understaffed shifts discovered at 4pm, and a manager rebuilding the schedule from memory every week.
A table held for a party of six that never shows up on a Saturday night is revenue the restaurant can never recover for that seating.
Lost covers on your highest-demand nights, with no deposit or reminder system to prevent it.
A wedding or office-lunch inquiry lands in an inbox nobody checks daily, and by the time someone replies the client has booked a competitor.
Your highest-margin business — catering — lost to whoever answers first.
A card that lives in a guest's wallet gets lost, forgotten or left at home, and the restaurant has no record of who its regulars even are.
No way to win back a regular who hasn't visited in six weeks, because nobody knows they stopped coming.
By the time the accountant produces a P&L, the month that lost money is already over and the next one has started the same way.
Pricing and portioning decisions made a full month too late to matter.
Manually reconciling tip pools and hours across a bilingual staff eats a manager's Monday morning, every week, without fail.
Hours of unpaid management time and the recurring risk of a payroll error someone has to explain to staff.
Pull one number this week: total delivery-app commission paid last month. That single figure usually funds the first project on this page.
Four layers, one menu and one guest record. Nothing gets retyped between the register and the kitchen.
Guest intake
Every way a guest reaches you — site, phone, walk-in — feeds the same order and reservation flow.
Kitchen & floor operations
The daily work: the menu, the schedule, the tickets and the tables.
Guest experience
A digital loyalty and communication layer that replaces the punch card and the group text.
Visibility
The numbers an owner or GM needs before Monday's prep list, not after month-end.
We do not replace your POS or force a new merchant processor on you. We connect to what you keep at the register and build the layer around it.
Six stages, each one paying for the next. Most Twin Cities restaurants are stuck at stage one.
A fast, mobile menu with commission-free direct ordering, so every guest who can order through an app can order through you instead.
Margin returns to the kitchen on every order that moves off third-party apps.
Digital booking with text confirmations and a waitlist guests can join from the sidewalk instead of standing at the door.
Fewer no-shows and a host stand that runs from one screen instead of a binder.
A schedule staff can see, swap and request time off from their phone, in English or Spanish.
No shift discovered empty at 4pm, and hours of manager time back every week.
Digital loyalty tied to a phone number, automated review requests, and win-back offers for guests who've drifted away.
Repeat visits you can measure and market to, instead of a punch card in a drawer.
Per-location sales, food cost, labor and commission-paid reporting in one dashboard the owner actually opens.
Pricing and staffing decisions made this week, not next month.
With ordering, staffing and reporting stable at one location, the operation can open a second or a third without rebuilding everything from scratch.
A system that scales with the business instead of a set of habits tied to one building.
We build one stage at a time and prove it in production before starting the next. Most restaurants should start with ordering — it's the fastest path back to margin.
Ordered by how quickly each one puts margin or hours back into the operation.
A branded ordering site connected to your kitchen, so a $32 ticket keeps the $8–$10 a delivery app would have taken.
Guests book or join the waitlist online, get a text when their table is ready, and the host stand runs from one screen.
zhAIro™ answers calls during the rush in English and Spanish, takes reservations and to-go orders, and never sends a caller to voicemail.
A schedule the whole team can see, swap and request changes to from their phone, replacing the group text and the whiteboard.
Loyalty tied to a phone number instead of a plastic card, with automated win-back offers for guests who haven't visited in weeks.
Sales, food cost, labor and delivery-app commission side by side, built from data your POS and apps already generate.
Each of these is a real scope a restaurant can start with — not a POS replacement or a suite you have to adopt whole.
A branded, mobile-first ordering flow for pickup, delivery and catering that sends tickets straight to the kitchen, with no per-order commission.
A live view of tonight's tables, reservations and waitlist with one tap to text a guest their table is ready.
Update a price or 86 an item once, and it updates on the site, the QR codes and every connected app at the same time.
A structured intake form that routes straight to whoever owns catering, with a templated quote ready in minutes instead of days.
Staff view their schedule, request a swap or call off, and managers approve from their phone — bilingual, start to finish.
Guests earn visits or points against a phone number at checkout, no app or card required, with automated rewards and win-back texts.
Weekly tip-pool and labor summaries pulled from your POS and scheduling data, formatted for payroll instead of rebuilt by hand.
Food cost, labor cost and commission paid, side by side by location and by week, built from data you already generate every shift.
A text sent a few hours after a good visit asking for a review, and a private feedback path for a rough one before it becomes a public post.
A restaurant system touches guest phone numbers, staff schedules and payment flows. That shapes how we build it.
We do not store raw card numbers — payment processing runs through your existing, PCI-compliant processor.
Guest phone numbers and order history are used only for the ordering, reservation and loyalty features you turn on — never sold or shared.
Staff scheduling data is scoped by role, so a server sees their own shifts and a manager sees the whole team.
Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, with backups and a documented restore path.
A departing employee is deactivated in one place, cutting off scheduling, ordering and loyalty-management access at once.
We are not a payment processor, a payroll provider or a food-safety authority. We build the software layer around the tools you already use for those, and we tell you plainly when a task belongs with your accountant, your POS provider or your health inspector instead of with us.
We're honest about which of these are restaurant-specific and which are adjacent systems built on the same architecture a restaurant needs.
Bilingual ordering & communication pattern
Multi-location, multi-role SaaS architecture
Local SEO for a service business
Measurable operational results owners and GMs report once the first two or three stages are live.
Orders moved from a 25–30% commission app to your own site keep that margin in the business.
Bilingual AI call coverage catches the to-go orders and reservation requests your staff can't get to.
Reservations, walk-ins and the waitlist live in one place instead of a binder and a manager's memory.
Shift swaps and call-offs are visible to a manager before the shift starts, not discovered when someone doesn't show up.
Digital loyalty tied to a phone number tells you who your best guests are and who's drifted away.
Per-location reporting surfaces a cost problem while there's still time in the month to fix it.
A routed intake form and templated quote mean the highest-margin business doesn't sit in an inbox.
Tip and labor summaries generated from data you already capture replace a manual Monday reconciliation.
A visual summary of the operational improvements restaurants commonly see once ordering, reservations and staffing tools are live.
Guests who used to order through a third-party app shift to a direct site once it's fast and easy to find.
Bilingual AI call coverage means no caller reaches voicemail during a Friday-night rush.
Text confirmations and reminders reduce the empty tables that a paper book can't prevent.
Self-service shift swaps and call-offs cut the weekly rebuild that used to take a manager's whole morning.
A phone-number-based program enrolls guests at checkout without asking anyone to download an app.
Per-location dashboards replace a month-end P&L as the first place an owner checks cost.
These are typical ranges from restaurant and adjacent operations work in Minnesota, not guarantees, and results depend on your menu, market and current systems. We baseline your current numbers before launch and review the same metrics with you after 90 days.
Products we operate today, ordered by how quickly a restaurant recovers margin or hours.
Every product listed is something we build and support directly for Minnesota businesses. Most restaurants start with ordering or AI call coverage and add the next piece once the first is paying for itself.
This hub keeps growing. Articles, videos, checklists, downloads and restaurant case studies are collected here as we publish them.
A short exercise to add up exactly what your restaurant paid in delivery-app commission last month.
When your POS vendor's ordering or loyalty add-on is enough, and when it starts costing you more than it saves.
New material for restaurant operators lands here first. The hub is built to keep expanding with articles, videos, downloads and demos without a redesign.
We build the same operating layer for other Minnesota businesses — different workflows, different systems, same engineering practice.
A few places to go next, whether you're scoping a first project or comparing options.
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Thirty minutes, no pitch deck. We'll tell you what we'd build, what it costs and whether it's worth it.
English & Español · Minneapolis–St. Paul & all of Minnesota