Restaurant web applications are either customer-facing or operator-facing. The good ones do both well.
Restaurants have thin margins and high operational complexity. Custom web applications built for restaurant groups — online ordering without the third-party commission, reservation management that integrates with the POS, staff scheduling that accounts for your specific floor plans and role requirements — pay for themselves by eliminating the commission drain and the operational inefficiency. Fixed scope, fixed price.
Your restaurant group is paying 15–30% commission on every online order to DoorDash or Uber Eats, or you're running reservations, waitlists, and staff scheduling across tools that don't talk to each other.
Third-party delivery platform dependency is the most expensive operational problem in the restaurant industry. DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub charge 15–30% commission per order — on an industry with 3–9% net margins. The math: a restaurant doing $50k/month in delivery orders through third-party platforms at 25% commission is paying $12,500/month in commission fees — $150,000/year — to platforms that own the customer relationship, own the customer data, and can adjust their terms at will.
The direct ordering alternative: a branded ordering web application with Stripe payment integration costs a flat 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction. On $50k/month of orders, that's $1,450 in payment processing fees vs. $12,500 in platform commissions. The $11,000/month difference pays for a custom ordering system in the first three months.
The operational fragmentation problem for multi-location restaurant groups: reservations managed in OpenTable (4% commission per covered or $249/month), waitlists managed in Yelp Waitlist, staff scheduling managed in 7shifts, POS data in Toast — and the manager who wants to see the full operational picture has to check four different systems and reconcile the data manually. A custom operations platform that pulls from the POS API, manages reservations and waitlists directly, and connects to the scheduling tool eliminates the dashboard-of-dashboards problem.
A custom restaurant web application — direct ordering, reservation management, or operations — built for your specific restaurant group, eliminating third-party commissions and integrating with your POS.
Direct ordering platform
Branded online ordering experience without third-party commissions. Menu management with item modifiers, combinations, and availability windows. Stripe payment integration at 2.9% + 30¢ (vs. 15–30% platform commission). Order routing to the kitchen display system or POS. Loyalty points accumulation for repeat customers.
Reservation and waitlist management
Online reservation booking with party size limits, time slot availability, and special request capture. Waitlist management with SMS notification when the table is ready. Google Reserve integration for reservations from Google Maps and Search.
POS integration layer
Square, Toast, or Clover API integration for menu sync, order injection, and sales data pull. Eliminates the manual menu update problem (menu lives in one place, syncs to all channels).
Multi-location operations dashboard
Daily sales by location. Covers by daypart. Labor cost as a percentage of sales. Food cost variance from theoretical. The management reporting a restaurant group needs without the manual spreadsheet assembly.
Staff scheduling integration
Labor demand forecast from reservation counts and historical sales data. Schedule visibility for staff via web portal. Time-off request management.
One honest number to start.
Fixed-scope, fixed-price. The number below is the starting point — final scope is built from your brief.
A custom restaurant web application — direct ordering, reservation management, or operations — built for your specific restaurant group, eliminating third-party commissions and integrating with your POS.
Three steps, every time.
The same repeatable engagement on every project. No surprises, no mystery, no billable ambiguity.
Brief & discovery.
We send you questions, then get on a call. Output: a written scope with every step, feature, and integration listed.
Build & ship.
Fixed schedule, weekly reviews. No scope creep unless you change the scope — and if you do, we reprice it transparently.
Warranty & retainer.
30-day warranty on every launch. Most clients stay on a monthly retainer for ongoing features and maintenance.
Why Fixed-Price Matters Here
Restaurant operators evaluate technology investments on commission savings and operational efficiency gains. Fixed price makes the business case clear.
Questions, answered.
For a restaurant doing $20k+/month in third-party delivery orders, the commission savings from a direct ordering platform typically covers the development cost within 12–18 months. Restaurants with higher delivery volume see payback in 6–9 months.
Yes — loyalty points accumulation, tiered rewards, and redemption at checkout are a standard addition to direct ordering platforms. Loyalty programs increase order frequency and average order value for repeat customers.
The menu management layer supports location-specific pricing, availability, and item availability. Items common to all locations are managed centrally; location-specific items and pricing overrides are managed per location. Changes at the central level propagate to all locations by default, with location override capability.
Direct ordering platform with POS integration: $25k–$45k. Multi-location operations platform with ordering, reservations, and reporting: $45k–$85k. Fixed-price.
Tell Ryel about your project.
Describe what you’re building and what outcome you need. You’ll have a written, fixed-price scope within the week.