zovex.app
Zovex is a QR-based restaurant ordering and management platform that lets guests order and pay from their phones while restaurants manage tables, orders, and analytics. Each restaurant gets a pre-hosted website on a custom subdomain (e.g., foodmaster.zovex.app) with customizable branding and live menu integration. Multi-tenant SaaS platform with real-time order management reducing order-to-kitchen time from 8 minutes to under 30 seconds.
Problem
Restaurants relying on paper menus, manual order-taking, and static websites face slower service (8+ minutes from order to kitchen), frequent errors, and fragmented online presence. They also struggle with the cost and complexity of maintaining their own website infrastructure, making it hard to run operations efficiently and accept modern online payments.
- Manual order-taking increases wait times (8+ minutes) and leads to errors during peak hours
- Paper menus and static PDFs are hard to update and provide no behavioral data
- No unified system to manage tables, in-house orders, online orders, and payments together
- High cost and technical complexity of hosting and maintaining a restaurant website
- Restaurant owners struggle to maintain a modern, up-to-date website connected to their live menu and availability
- Lack of real-time visibility into order status and kitchen operations
Solution
A full-stack multi-tenant SaaS platform where guests scan a table QR to view the live menu, place orders, and pay online. Each restaurant gets a pre-hosted website on a custom subdomain with customizable branding and real-time menu synchronization. Features optimized database queries, WebSocket implementation, BYOK payment support, and ML-powered recommendations.
- Architected and deployed multi-tenant SaaS platform with real-time order management, reducing order-to-kitchen time from 8 minutes to under 30 seconds through optimized database queries and WebSocket implementation
- Built scalable subdomain-based architecture with tenant isolation, integrated payment orchestration (BYOK support), and ML-powered menu recommendations
- Established testing pipeline with Pytest for backend services and Playwright for E2E flows; set up GitHub Actions for automated CI/CD deployment
- Optimized concurrent request handling and implemented monitoring with Sentry for production error tracking
- Implemented real-time menu synchronization so changes appear instantly across QR menus and public websites
- Designed QR-based ordering flow that eliminates manual order-taking and reduces errors
- Created live order management dashboard with real-time updates across all connected devices
- Developed ML recommendation system using collaborative filtering and content-based signals from order history
- Integrated transactional email notifications with Resend for order confirmations and updates
Outcome
The platform streamlines in-restaurant ordering with 16x faster order-to-kitchen times (from 8 minutes to under 30 seconds), provides instant online presence through pre-hosted subdomains, and lays the groundwork for data-driven recommendations that can increase average order value.
- Reduced order-to-kitchen time from 8 minutes to under 30 seconds (16x improvement)
- Instant online presence with pre-hosted websites on custom subdomains (e.g., restaurantname.zovex.app)
- Eliminated website hosting and maintenance costs for restaurant owners
- Improved order accuracy by sending orders directly from guest devices to the kitchen dashboard
- Centralized management of locations, tables, menus, orders, payments, and public website in a unified interface
- Enabled restaurants to accept online payments via their own gateways while Zovex handles orchestration
- Real-time updates across all devices using WebSocket implementation
- Created foundation for leveraging historical order and menu data for smarter recommendations and analytics
- Handling daily orders for multi-table restaurant environments in production
- Automated CI/CD pipeline ensuring reliable deployments
Challenges
Designing a platform that combines subdomain routing, real-time order management, table management, online ordering, website customization, BYOK payments, and ML-driven recommendations while achieving sub-30-second order times required careful performance optimization and architecture decisions.
- Implementing dynamic subdomain routing with Next.js middleware while maintaining clean separation between restaurant websites
- Building multi-tenant architecture where each restaurant's website is isolated but shares infrastructure
- Optimizing database queries and implementing WebSocket for real-time updates to achieve 16x performance improvement
- Modeling tables, orders, menus, and websites so they stay in sync while serving both in-house and online guests
- Keeping order and payment states consistent and traceable when using external payment providers
- Ensuring low-latency, real-time updates between guest devices, owner dashboards, and kitchen views
- Planning and implementing recommendation features while dealing with early cold-start and evolving data volume
- Building comprehensive testing pipeline covering unit tests (Pytest) and E2E flows (Playwright)
- Setting up automated CI/CD with GitHub Actions for reliable production deployments
Key Learnings
The project provided hands-on experience in building a production-ready vertical SaaS for restaurants that combines subdomain routing, real-time order management, QR ordering, website building, payments, ML features, and comprehensive testing/deployment pipelines.
- Mastered performance optimization techniques reducing order processing time by 16x through database query optimization and WebSocket implementation
- Mastered dynamic subdomain routing using Next.js middleware for multi-tenant SaaS architecture
- Learned to design order and table lifecycles that work for both small single-location restaurants and more complex setups
- Deepened understanding of the cold-start problem and how to shape the UX and data model to collect high-value behavioral data for ML
- Gained experience implementing BYOK payment flows and reconciling external gateway states with internal order logic
- Refined patterns for building real-time, observable systems with proper error monitoring using Sentry
- Developed expertise in testing strategies with Pytest for backend and Playwright for E2E flows
- Mastered CI/CD pipeline setup with GitHub Actions for automated deployments
- Learned to handle concurrent requests efficiently in production environments