Tabern

Roadmap

Tabern's execution plan: the product thesis, what's shipped, what's in flight, and the path to the consumer platform.

Tabern is a vertical SaaS play with a marketplace endgame. Phase one sells restaurants the toolkit they already pay for (websites, menus, bookings, loyalty) and collects the one asset no incumbent has: structured, venue-maintained menu data. Every subscription funds the data flywheel; the data flywheel funds the consumer business.

Phase 1: Foundation

Complete

The complete owner toolkit, in production and revenue-generating. This is the SaaS business that funds everything downstream and the onboarding funnel for the dataset.

  • Venue websitesPages, sections, branding, snapshot-based publishing. The product venues see first and keep paying for.Live
  • Menu managerThree-level menus with sections, items, and variations, plus dietary tags and item photos. The backbone of every other feature.Live
  • AI menu scannerUpload photos or PDFs of an existing menu and it imports as structured data: menus, sections, items, prices, and dietary tags (including printed symbol legends). It groups sections into separate menus such as Food and Drinks, and the owner renames and rearranges before importing.Live
  • Deals & promosScheduled, recurring promotions: time-bound commercial signals layered onto the menu graph.Live
  • BookingsThe guest-facing booking page, wired to OpenTable, Resy, Toast, or Square, plus DoorDash and Uber Eats delivery links and a Google Business Profile connection. Integration, not competition, with the booking incumbents.Live
  • KiosksCounter rewards scanner and ambient menu display. Physical footprint inside the venue, every service day.Live
  • AnalyticsFirst-party, consent-gated page-view analytics. No third-party trackers, clean data ownership.Live
  • ReferralsOwner referral links and codes that flow through signup and checkout. The growth engine is already in the product.Live

Phase 2: Owner experience

You are here

What current customers ask for most: making the site truly theirs, the retention loop of rewards and wallet passes, physical tap devices that bring guests online from the table, and staff collaboration. The upgrades that expand accounts and lift retention before the consumer launch.

  • Team accessMulti-seat dashboards with roles. Unlocks group and multi-location accounts, the highest-value SaaS segment.Next up
  • Custom domainsServe the venue site on the owner’s own domain with automatic TLS. The most-requested upgrade for making a Tabern site feel fully theirs.Live
  • RewardsVisit-based punch cards with member QR check-in and self-managed accounts. Guests sign in with an emailed code or with Continue with Google or Continue with Apple. The retention loop that makes the subscription sticky.Live
  • Wallet passesMembers add their rewards card to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet and check in from their phone. Owners send messages to pass holders, and Google Wallet passes can remind guests when they’re nearby. A customer touchpoint that lives in the guest’s pocket.Live
  • Tabern devices & tap cardsNFC tap Cards, Stands, and Dots sold through the Tabern device store. A guest taps or scans one to open the venue’s site; owners activate each card, choose which venue it opens, and see taps on the Overview.Live
  • Free website with a deviceBuying a Tabern device earns one free, publishable website per account: menu, hours, deals, and booking links. The paid plan, billed per website, adds the AI scanner, rewards, kiosks, wallet notifications, and custom domains.Live

Phase 3: Consumer discovery

Planned

The consumer platform, built on the menu data venues already maintain. A venue gets a public listing the moment its menu is published. Guests find it with AI search or on a live map, open a tab and order right on the venue’s own site, and come back through one Tabern account that carries their rewards and favorite places across every venue.

  • Tabern guest accountOne sign-in across every Tabern venue, with Google, Apple, or an emailed code. Rewards cards, wallet passes, open tabs, and saved places live in a single account instead of one per venue.Planned
  • AI searchGuests ask in plain language ("good gluten-free pasta, open tonight, near me") and AI answers from structured menu and venue data: sections, items, prices, dietary tags, and opening hours. Answers match what the venue is actually serving right now.Planned
  • Menu searchGuests search across venues by dish, dietary tag, price, and neighborhood. Results are built from live menus, with current items and current prices, instead of scraped snapshots that drift out of date.Planned
  • Live mapA real-time map of every Tabern venue: who’s open now, which deals are running, and where food trucks are parked at this moment. Locations stay current for the same reason menus do: the venue maintains them.Planned
  • GPS food truck trackerA new device in the Tabern store, alongside Cards, Stands, and Dots. It mounts in the truck and broadcasts the truck’s live location to its own site and the live map, so guests always know where to find it. It brings food trucks and pop-ups to Tabern as a new venue segment.Planned
  • Live tab orderingGuests open a tab and order from the table, inline on the venue’s own site. The tap Card or Dot on the table opens the menu, orders go straight to the venue in real time, and the tab stays open until the guest settles up.Planned
  • Booking from the listingA listing links straight into the venue’s existing booking flow (OpenTable, Resy, Toast, or Square), so a guest who finds a dish can reserve a table in the same session. Venues keep the booking relationship they already have.Planned
  • Item-level reviewsGuests review specific menu items rather than the venue as a whole. Owners see per-item feedback in their dashboard; guests see dish-level ratings on the listing.Planned

The thesis

Today's discovery incumbents run on scraped, stale menu data: wrong prices, dead items, no structure. Tabern flips the model. The venue maintains its menu in Tabern because that menu is its website, its kiosks, and its rewards program. The consumer product inherits menus that are fully indexed, live, and commercially accurate by construction, a moat that deepens with every venue onboarded.

Where we are

Phase 1 is complete and revenue-generating: the full owner toolkit is in production, billing through Stripe. Most of Phase 2 has shipped: custom domains, rewards with Apple and Google Wallet passes and notifications, Google and Apple sign-in for members, and the Tabern device store with NFC tap cards. A device purchase now earns a free website and the paid plan unlocks the full toolkit, so device sales are another way venues bring their menus into Tabern. Team access is the remaining Phase 2 item.

Phase 3 is the consumer platform the first two phases were built to fund and feed: one Tabern account for guests across every venue, AI search and a real-time map over live menus, tab ordering inline on each venue's site, and a GPS tracker device that puts food trucks on the map as they move.

Get in touch

Investors and partners: reach the founding team from the Community page or reach out to support@tabern.app. We're happy to walk through metrics, the data moat, and the consumer roadmap in detail.