We already use a reservation platform. Would you replace it?
Almost certainly not. Those products are good at covers and we would keep it. What they tend to handle badly is the private event — the enquiry that arrives as a paragraph about a fortieth birthday and needs a room, a menu, a deposit and a final headcount. That is usually the piece worth building, sitting next to what you already have rather than instead of it.
I run the shop alone. When am I supposed to learn a new system?
You are not, and if a build needs training it has failed. For a one-person shop the test is whether it takes less of your time in week two than the old way did. We keep the first build to one job, hand it over in an hour, and if you have to ring us to use it we treat that as our problem to fix.
Could the village or the business association use this rather than each shop separately?
That is often the better buy. A shared district calendar and a vacancy list cost roughly the same to build once as they would for two individual businesses, and the whole street gets them. We have no objection to being paid once by an association instead of seventy-five times, and we will say so if that is the sensible route.
How do you keep an AI from telling a guest something that is not true?
By not letting it speak unsupervised. Drafts go into a queue behind a review gate we call SolaceSentry, and a person clicks approve before a guest sees a word of it. On top of that, anything factual — hours, availability, a price — comes from your records rather than from the model's idea of what sounds right.
Whose customer list is it?
Yours, entirely. The names, the booking history, the mailing list — all of it exports in a plain file whenever you want, and the accounts are registered to your business, not to us. In a district this small, a customer list is most of what a shop is worth, and we treat it that way.
What does a first project cost and how is it priced?
We map the process with you first, then quote a fixed figure for a defined scope, so you are not signing up for an open meter. For a single-purpose build here — event enquiries, or stock and reservations — that is a small, bounded project. If halfway through we find the real answer is a product you can buy, we will tell you and refund the difference rather than build it anyway.
Do you do the website too, or only the systems behind it?
Both, and usually together, because a booking page that looks nothing like the restaurant is its own problem. But we will not talk you into a rebuild you do not need. If your site is fine and the failure is what happens after somebody fills the form in, we fix that part and leave the rest alone.
Is there anything you would refuse to build here?
Anything that pretends to be a person. We will not build a chat that impersonates you to a guest, and we will not send messages in your name that you have not read. Small hospitality runs on people recognising each other, and a system that fakes that does more damage than the time it saves.