Direct Dine
A commission-free ordering and growth platform for restaurants: branded PWA storefront, QR dine-in, live kitchen board, AI upselling, WhatsApp reservations. Built end to end, now sold as a subscription.
The problem
Independent restaurants hand 25–30% of every order to delivery apps, and never learn who the customer was. The alternative — a legacy POS with an ordering add-on — is expensive, slow to change, and still not theirs.
What I built
A branded progressive web app on the restaurant's own domain, a per-table QR dine-in flow, an owner dashboard, and a kitchen screen that prints tickets the second an order is paid. Every channel reads one menu and writes to one order stream, so adding a channel later never means rebuilding anything.
The AI parts that earn their place
Upsell and pairing suggestions from order history. Demand forecasting and low-stock alerts. And screenshot-to-order: staff drop in an Instagram or WhatsApp message, a vision model reads the lines, matches them to the live menu, and creates a real order after a one-tap review. Restaurants choose the provider — Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini or local Ollama.
Engineering decisions
Laravel with queues for anything touching an external provider, WebSockets for the order board, Redis for menu and session caching, role-based access for owner, kitchen and floor staff. Multi-location tenancy from the first migration, because retrofitting it later is where products die.
Where it stands
Live, priced from $50 to $199 a month with no contract, plus a WordPress plugin so restaurants can keep the site they already own. I run product, engineering and onboarding.