POS Dost started in a café, not in a boardroom. Running a small food business in India means juggling a billing machine, a stock diary, a WhatsApp group for staff attendance, and a separate tablet for every delivery app. The software we paid for was supposed to make that simpler. Mostly it added another thing to manage.
The specific complaints were boring and constant. Billing froze when the internet went. Adding one new item took a dozen fields. Nobody could tell us what a dish actually cost to make. And when a delivery platform paid less than expected, there was no way to find out why without opening a spreadsheet.
So we built the thing we wanted. One login that covers the counter, the kitchen screen, stock and recipes, staff records, expenses, customers, and the delivery platforms. Built for an Indian food business first — rupees, GST, UPI, Swiggy and Zomato, and the whole thing usable in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu or Kannada — rather than an American product with India bolted on afterwards.
It started with our own café, but almost none of it is café-specific. A restaurant needs the tables and the kitchen stations. A cloud kitchen skips both and lives in the delivery integrations. A bakery cares most about what a tray of croissants actually costs to make. Same system, different half of it switched on.
"Dost" means friend. That's the bar we set: software that behaves like a helpful friend at the counter, not another system you have to manage.
How we build it
The counter comes first
If a feature makes billing slower, it doesn't go on the billing screen. Reports can wait; a queue at the counter can't.
Say it in normal words
Buttons say what they do. Errors say what went wrong. If we have to write a manual for a screen, the screen is wrong.
Nothing disappears quietly
Stock adjustments, payout mismatches, failed menu pushes — they show up with a reason attached, and a person decides what happens.
Assume the internet is bad
Because in a lot of places it is. Billing works on the device and syncs later, not the other way round.
Where the product stands
The system is built and running. Everything shown on this site is a real screen from our working build, filled with test data — that's why the names and phone numbers in the screenshots are blurred out.
Testing is going well. We're working through it module by module and the list of problems keeps getting shorter — far enough along that the next honest step is putting it in real kitchens rather than testing it ourselves.
So before the 2027 launch we're taking on a small group of pilot businesses: free to use, set up with your own menu and stock, and a direct line to us. Pricing isn't fixed yet and we're not going to quote a number we'd have to take back later.
If that sounds like something you'd want to be part of, we'd like to hear from you.