Pricing software, built from a kitchen and sold to three of them

Most restaurants price their menu on instinct, because the alternative is a spreadsheet nobody maintains. They know what a dish sells for. They do not reliably know what it costs them once wastage, portioning drift and vendor price changes are counted — which means they do not know which items are carrying the business and which are quietly draining it.

A pricing and profit calculator: enter your recipe, your vendor costs and your wastage, and see the margin each menu price actually returns. Purpose-built and small enough that an owner would actually open it, rather than a system they would need training for.

Three restaurants bought it outright at ₹70,000 each. Not a trial, not a subscription — they paid for the software and owned it.

I closed it after that. Three customers does not justify an indefinite support commitment, and I would rather end a product cleanly than let it become a slow tax on my time. The knowledge went into ELTH.

Because I knew the operations first. I costed food in a live kitchen at seventeen and have run vendor pricing, wastage and margin ever since. The hard part of a tool like this is never the arithmetic — it is knowing which numbers an owner actually has to hand, and which ones they will make up if you ask for them.