A restaurant or shop owner reading this should understand five things in 90 seconds. We mean them, we wrote them down, and we made them hard to change.
Our thesis
We're giving you premium real estate at .shop/your-handle for a small share of card-processing fees you'd be paying anyway. That's the trade. That's it.
We can do more with less. We are not a marketplace extracting rent from your business. We are not building a customer database to sell to your competitors. We are not chasing growth targets imposed by investors who need us to squeeze you a little harder every quarter to justify their next funding round.
What we offer you is above and beyond what a venture-funded platform can ever sustainably give you, because we are not structured to need what they need from you. We are structured to keep the promises below.
1. We will never sell your placement on this platform.
How your shop appears on our directory pages is determined by public, written-down criteria — your rating, your order or booking volume, your proximity to the customer's search, your hours, your verification status. No one can pay to rank higher than you.
There is no "Sponsored" tag. There is no "Promoted" tag. There is no auction for a better slot.
The criteria for any badge we display (Recommended, Verified, Local Favorite) are stated next to the badge, and there is no money path to earn it. You can rank higher only by being a better business — better photos, faster response, more complete profile, more accurate hours, higher customer ratings. That is the only way.
2. We will never hide our fees from you.
Every dollar that flows through our platform on your behalf is itemized on a page you can see at any time: what your customer paid, what card processing cost, what surcharge you kept, what we kept, and when it settles to your account.
We will never charge a fee that isn't already published. Changes to fees require 60 days of written notice on your dashboard — never retroactive, never effective immediately, never buried in a terms-of-service update you didn't read.
3. We will never hold your data hostage.
Your menu, your customer list, your order or appointment history, your photos — all of it is yours.
There is a button in your dashboard called Export Everything. It works. There is no exit interview, no retention call, no "are you sure?" friction. If you decide to leave, your CardPointe merchant account stays with you (it was always yours), and we will help you forward your .shop/your-handle URL anywhere you want it to go.
We will not make leaving harder than staying. Our job is to keep being worth using.
4. We will never sell your customers' data, or use them to enrich anyone but you.
The email addresses, phone numbers, and order or visit patterns of customers who buy from your shop belong to you. We will not sell them. We will not share them across other shops on the platform. We will not use them to train models that benefit a competitor. We will not embed third-party tracking pixels that hand your customers' behavior to advertisers.
Your customer is your customer.
5. We will tell you when we mess up.
When our platform has an outage that affects your business, you will receive a postmortem — what happened, how long it lasted, what we are doing about it. Not silence, not a generic apology, not "intermittent issues" hand-waving.
You can see every system action that touched your shop in an audit log we do not redact. We will not pretend reliability we do not have.
What we ask in return
- That you pay the published subscription fee for the parts of the platform that have one. Food verticals are $0 per location per month. Other verticals are per-location and per-pro at published rates.
- That you process payments through our integrated gateway (CardPointe), since this is how we make money. You own the merchant account.
- That you not abuse the platform to deceive your customers — fake reviews, fraudulent listings, items you don't actually sell. We will moderate these, transparently, with a stated appeals process.
That is the entire list.
How we make money, plainly
For food verticals: we earn a small residual on every card transaction processed through our integrated CardPointe gateway. Your customer pays, the card networks take their cut, you keep your surcharge revenue, we earn a few cents. Nothing else. The published subscription for food is $0 per location per month, and that is not a promotional rate — that is the model.
For other verticals (barber, salon, tattoo, medspa, and others): the same payment-processing residual, plus a published per-location and per-pro monthly subscription. The exact numbers are on our pricing page and subject to the 60-day-notice rule in commitment #2.
That is the totality of revenue we collect from you, the shop owner. We may in the future develop revenue streams that do not come out of your pocket — for example, hardware-kit sales, premium optional add-ons, or business-to-business arrangements with suppliers who want to reach shops. None of those would violate the commitments above, and any such offering would be itemized and opt-in.
How these commitments can change
These principles are versioned in our public source repository. Every change is dated and signed in the commit history.
To change any of these five commitments, we require:
- 90 days of public notice on every owner's dashboard — not in a terms-of-service update, not in an email you might miss, on the dashboard you log into every day.
- Explicit acknowledgment by each owner on their next login. You see the change. You read it. You click that you saw it. We do not silently opt you in.
- A plain-English explanation of what changed and why.
If we cannot justify a change to our owners in plain English, we do not make the change.
Why we wrote this down
Promises that are not written down do not survive contact with money. We have seen what happens to platforms that begin with the right values and erode them quarter by quarter under pressure from investors, growth targets, or expedience. The only durable defense is to write the commitments down in a place where breaking them costs more than honoring them.
This is that place.