The product is a SaaS and marketing platform for bars and restaurants that helps venues increase customer engagement, simplify tab management, and drive repeat visits. The application lets guests open, monitor, and pay their tab directly from a mobile device, while giving venues real-time tools to promote offers and build customer loyalty.
Bars and restaurants face a range of operational and marketing challenges: guests waste time waiting for the bill and for payment, staff are overloaded with manual POS operations, and venues lack a convenient channel through which they can promptly inform customers about new promotions and special offers. A separate issue is managing “forgotten” open tabs, where the guest leaves the venue without closing the check. The team’s challenge was to build a solution that would combine a consumer-facing mobile application with a cloud-native backend synchronized in real time with the venue’s POS system, while ensuring a high level of security for payment and personal data. Additional requirements included refining the architectural and logical design on top of an existing UI prototype, implementing integrations with third-party services (payment gateways and digital wallets, phone verification, push notifications, and geolocation), and designing a data model to store information about venues, promotions, and digital receipts.
The team designed and implemented a comprehensive solution consisting of a mobile client and an event-driven backend API built on cloud-native principles with real-time data synchronization. The platform is designed so that the application acts as a customer-facing interface of the venue’s POS system: when a tab is opened, the user’s data is pushed into the POS, and transactions and check items are streamed back to the guest’s device in real time.
Key functionality includes user registration and authentication with phone number verification and social login, linking of payment methods (Apple Pay, digital wallets, and bank cards via PCI-compliant gateways), geolocation services for detecting the nearest venues and automatically closing the tab when the guest moves away from the restaurant, as well as a flexible push notification system for new partner venues and active deals. For guests who have notifications disabled, a discovery section is available with a list of restaurants sorted by rating, city, and distance, displaying the rating, current promotion, and proximity on each venue card.
A separate module covers payment scenarios: the user sees the bill in real time, selects a tip (a fixed percentage or a custom amount), pays with the chosen method, after which the venue’s POS system automatically registers the transaction as completed, and the guest receives a digital receipt in the app. A “grace period” logic with multi-channel reminders (push + SMS) is implemented for cases when the guest forgets to close the tab before the venue closes, along with automatic charging of a fixed gratuity once the grace period expires. Particular attention was paid to security: payment data tokenization, end-to-end encryption of sensitive information, and the design of an additional transaction confirmation step via biometrics (Face ID / Touch ID) or passcode.
The result is a market-ready product combining a consumer mobile application and a server-side platform with POS, payment service, and geolocation integrations. Venues received a tool that simultaneously improves operational efficiency (by automating tab opening and closing, providing digital receipts, and reducing staff workload) and acts as a marketing channel – enabling real-time promotion of deals, attracting new guests through geo-based discovery, and retaining existing ones through personalized offers and loyalty mechanics (including a free birthday drink and a top-up virtual loyalty card for boosting retention). Guests, in turn, gained a seamless mobile experience: one-tap tab opening and payment, a transparent real-time bill, digital receipts in a single storage, and discovery of nearby venues with relevant offers. The API-first architecture enabled horizontal scalability and fast onboarding of new partner venues without any client-side changes.