We built EasyKOT for our restaurant counter

A till is judged in one minute, at 8:40 on a Saturday.

Our restaurant has forty seats. Enough evenings at its till teach you what a screen costs you in the rush. The parcel phone rings, three tables want to settle at once, the kitchen wants the next round, and the cashier needs the bill printed before the customer has their wallet out. Nobody at that counter cares what the software can do on a quiet Tuesday. It is judged in that minute, and only in that minute.

The shape of the renewal, not any one number.

We were already paying for restaurant software. It was a fair deal on the day we signed up. What changed our mind was the shape of the renewal: the base plan was one number, and the things we wanted next were priced as separate modules on top of it. For a forty-seat place the maths stopped working before the wish list ran out.

So we went looking for a till where the price was one number on one page, with everything in it. We did not find one. We write software for a living, so we wrote it.

A till a new cashier could use on their first evening.

Without an owner standing behind them. Three panels: categories, menu, cart. A KOT that fires in one tap and prints in the kitchen even when the internet is down. A GST bill with business details, invoice numbers and tax breakdowns to review with my accountant. A phone in each waiter's pocket instead of a pad. And the day's numbers on the owner's phone at home, so nobody stays late to tally.

That was the whole specification. Everything else in EasyKOT exists because one of those five things needed it.

Then we ran our restaurant on it.

Every day since, the bills at our counter have come out of this software, and the things that annoyed us at 8:40pm got fixed the next morning, because the people who could fix them were standing at the counter. The kitchen decided how a KOT should look. The cashier decided where the buttons go. The accountant decided what day close prints. A failed print waits in a queue and retries instead of losing the sale, because one night it did not.

That is when it stopped being only ours.

A friend with a smaller place asked what we were using. If a forty-seat restaurant needs this, a twelve-seat one needs it more, and it should cost what one shop can pay: ₹299 + GST a month, printed on the page, with the captain app, the kitchen display included in the plan. That is the bill I wanted to receive, so it is the bill we send.