Dinner gets decided
on a phone.

A different question

Your menu is the point

A plate makes somebody hungry. A menu is what turns that into a table. On Saucer they are the same screen: see a dish you want, press it, and there is the menu it came off — your sections, your wording, your prices.

Start from the menu, or start from the photographs

Type your whole menu in tonight if you like — every section, every dish, every price — before a single photograph exists. A dish does not need a picture to be on the menu, and the ones without sit there waiting. As your customers photograph their food, you put each plate on the dish it belongs to, and the menu fills itself in.

Or work the other way: leave the menu alone and let the photographs arrive first, then name each one as it comes in.

• Sections you choose — Entrees, Specials, Late Night Only, whatever your menu actually says.
• Prices you set, shown to guests or kept to yourself — one switch for the whole menu.
• Every dish collects the plates your diners photographed of it. You decide which photograph belongs to which dish, so the menu gains pictures as people eat without anything appearing on it unasked.
• Nothing goes live until you publish it. A half-written menu is invisible.
• You pick which photograph leads a dish, and change it whenever a better one arrives.

Where the photographs come from

1. 1
   They are already being taken. Your customers photograph their food today, and today it dies in a camera roll. Saucer is where it lands instead: filed under your restaurant, against the dish it is.
2. 2
   Nobody posts out of duty. A review is homework. A plate is a brag. People post because it makes them look good — and your kitchen is in every frame.
3. 3
   One plate reaches two rooms. Their friends see it because it's theirs. Strangers see it because it's good — and the feed is bounded to people close enough to drive to you.
4. 4
   It is tonight, not all time. The feed is built out of the last few hours. What people see is what is coming out of kitchens now, which is the only version of this worth opening twice.
5. 5
   Only food gets through. Every photo is checked before it posts. The feed can't drift into anything else, so your page stays a wall of dinner.
6. 6
   You can pay the plate forward. Sponsor a customer's photograph and the money goes to the customer. Saucer takes no cut of it. Saucer is the only advertising platform where the customer that created the ad gets paid for a return visit just for taking a photo!

Served tonight

Straight off the live feed — every one of these was taken by somebody sitting in the restaurant it names.

Claiming your page

$100 a year

Menu creation tools and Sponsored Plates. Both, for the one price.

Paying is the claim. Nobody reads an email deciding whether you deserve a restaurant. You find your restaurant, you pay, the page is yours: the menu, what's shown on it, and sponsoring a customer's plate.

We check one thing first, and it takes a few questions: that the place is real. Tell us the restaurant's name, your part in it, and a phone number or website — then the payment link appears. It is the only thing we check, and it is the only reason anybody is turned away.

A new page starts empty, and it has to. There is no upload box for owners anywhere on Saucer — every photo comes from a diner who was served. The first plate on your page will come out of your own dining room.

Take the photographs with you — free

Every plate on Saucer carries a small Saucer badge in the corner. Save any of them and post them wherever you like — your social media, your website, a flyer. That costs nothing and always will. The badge is the only thing we ask for in return, and it is how the people who see it find out where dinner came from.

There is no unbadged version and nothing to buy to get one. Every photograph that leaves Saucer says where it came from.

What Saucer doesn't do

• No ratings. Nothing here is marked out of five, by anyone.
• No anonymous reviews.
• No app to download. It's the web, opened from a phone.
• No waitlists, pagers, seating charts or table gadgets.
• No owner photo uploads — that isn't an oversight, it's the point.
• No cut of what you pay a customer to sponsor a plate.

Advertising you pay for only when it works

Sponsoring a plate is how you advertise on Saucer, and it is the only way. You take a photograph one of your customers made in your dining room, put a discount on it, and it goes in front of people close enough to walk in tonight.

There is no ad spend, no bidding, no cost per thousand people who scrolled past. Saucer takes no cut and settles nothing — the code is honoured at your own till, by you. The only thing it costs is the discount itself, and you hand that over at the moment somebody is standing in front of you with their phone out. You are not buying attention and hoping. You are buying the second visit, once it has actually happened.

The discount is yours to shape

A percentage or a dollar amount. Off the whole bill, or off one named course. A minimum spend, if you want one. The days of the week it runs and the hours inside those days. And an expiry you set as a date and a clock time, because these run inside a shift — "good until 11pm tonight" has to be sayable.

The diner who took the photograph gets a code of their own. On top of that you can open the same offer to anyone who sees the plate, with a limit on how many you are willing to honour — the card counts down as they are claimed, so you are never on the hook for more than you said.

One code clears them all

You have a single restaurant code. When somebody shows you a discount on their phone, your server types that code into it and it clears on the spot. There is no tablet to find, no account for your staff, nothing to install and nothing to learn — anyone on the floor can do it on their first shift.

Change the code whenever you want to, in a tap — staff leave, and a code typed on guests' phones all evening gets around. The screen tells you when it last changed, so you know how old the current one is. And signed in on your own device you can still work it the other way round, by typing the diner's code yourself.

What it does on the feed

A sponsored plate runs for an hour, in six ten-minute rounds. The first round is the boost: straight to the top. After that it holds its place on likes, against the other sponsored plates — so the hour is earned, not just bought. It can never outrank a plate somebody posted in the last ten minutes, because fresh food wins here, and you can run as many at once as you care to pay for.

Sponsored Plates are included

The $100 a year covers both halves of what a restaurant does here — the Menu creation tools and Sponsored Plates — and you can run as many sponsorships as you like for it.

Sponsored Plates will be a paid product one day — but not for the restaurants that were here first. Claim your page while Saucer is in beta and you are a Charter Member: Sponsored Plates stay inside your yearly membership when everyone who comes later is paying for them.