I had a restaurant.
A delivery app bankrupted it.
Graffiti, in Waterford. Kebabs, pizza, burgers, hand-cut chips. A proper takeaway. By every measure I had, it was working. The orders were coming in. The machine was printing. The numbers looked real.
That was the trap.
The platform was taking thirty percent. More than thirty, once you factored everything in. But when you're behind the counter in the middle of service, you don't stop to run the numbers. You keep cooking. You tell yourself it's going well because it feels like it's going well.
It's not until the end of the month - when you're staring at your actual bank account - that the number becomes real. I wasn't breaking even. Not even close. The revenue was there. The orders were there. But after the commissions, the ingredients, the packaging, the labour - there was nothing left. Some months, less than nothing.
And the part that still stings: those customers were NEVER mine. Every person who ordered from me through the platform - their name, their address, their order history - that belonged to them. I couldn't email my OWN customers. I couldn't run a midweek offer. I couldn't say "hey, I've added something new, come back." The relationship I thought I was building with MY customers? That was the platform's relationship. I was just the kitchen.
I closed Graffiti. Not because the food wasn't good. Not because people didn't want it. Because the economics were designed to make me dependent on a platform that would always take more than I could afford to give.
That was the end of my restaurant dream. And the start of Tine.Irish.
I spent the last nine months - over a thousand hours - building a direct online ordering system for restaurants. I taught myself what I needed. I rebuilt it when I got it wrong. I rebuilt it again when I got it closer but not right.
Tine.Irish lets customers order directly from you. No platform. No middleman who owns the relationship. The full build is €999 one-off founding setup — live in seven days, no monthly fees. After that, a small per-order fee keeps it running. Nothing hidden.
And your customers are YOURS - their email, their order history, their ability to hear from you again without you paying someone else for access to your OWN customer.
Here's the honest part. I built this mostly in the dark — solving for problems I had, without nearly enough input from restaurants that are actually trading right now. Tine.Irish works. But it's not perfect. Not yet. It needs to be tested against real menus, real customers, and real feedback before I can say it's exactly right.
That's why I'm offering founding pricing. The first 10 restaurants get the full build for €999 — live in seven days, no monthly fees, and only a small per-order fee after that. One spot is already taken.