Building a Commission-Free QR Menu & Ordering Platform for Independent Restaurants
A multi-tenant SaaS that turns a restaurant's paper menu into a mobile menu, a per-table QR code and a direct ordering channel, built so an independent restaurant keeps its margin instead of paying a marketplace commission of up to 30%.
56
Domain model tables shipped in one schema
2×
Tenant isolation enforced independently (ORM + Postgres RLS)
30%
Marketplace commission the direct-ordering channel is designed to recover
WhatsApp messaging gets complicated at scale.
Independent restaurants wanting online ordering are pushed onto delivery marketplaces charging commissions of up to 30% in France, while cheap QR-menu tools treat allergen data as free text and model prix-fixe formule menus as unstructured text instead of orderable choice groups. Codeprism built Carte Numérique (a multi-tenant SaaS that gives a restaurant its own digital menu, per-table QR ordering and a kitchen order queue), specified and stress-tested against a real, corrupted paper-menu scan from its first design partner, Royal Punjab in Paris.
Challenge 1
Marketplace commissions of up to 30% eat directly into delivery margin
Challenge 2
Menus frozen in print: a price change means a reprint, not an edit
Challenge 3
Cheap QR-menu tools treat allergen declaration as free text, not the structured legal requirement it is under EU 1169/2011
Challenge 4
Prix-fixe formule menus modelled as text, not as orderable choice groups, where the lunch trade actually happens
Challenge 5
Comparable products rely on one restaurant-wide QR plus a manually typed table number, so orders can't be reliably attributed to a table
Modelling the whole long-range domain up front costs nothing when the MVP only touches part of it, and saves a re-migration later
Two independent layers of tenant isolation is the right amount for a multi-tenant SaaS: one alone has a known bypass
The unglamorous data problem (a corrupted paper-menu scan) is the actual product moat, not the QR code or the menu UI
Collapsing three planned frontends into one Next.js app with route-group-level auth shipped a working three-persona loop in days, not the weeks a three-surface build would have taken
Built with technologies we trust.
Project Goals
The Outcome
A commission-free direct ordering channel, live end-to-end from QR scan to kitchen queue, built and verified in the same week the specification was finalized.
Conclusion & Impact
"This project showed that a defensible restaurant-ordering SaaS isn't won on the QR code: every part of that pitch is commoditised in France. It's won on the parts competitors treat as an afterthought: compliance-grade allergen data instead of a free-text field, an ingestion pipeline that survives a real corrupted phone scan instead of a clean demo PDF, formules modelled as real orderable structure instead of a text blob, and tenant isolation that fails closed instead of leaking. Designing the full long-range domain model before writing the first controller meant the MVP and every later phase land on the same schema with zero rework."
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