The company
Restaurants should own the demand they create
OwnTable is the front-of-house operating system for independent restaurants — the direct ordering channel, the AI that answers it, and the customer list that comes out the other side.
- what marketplaces charge per order
- 15–30%what marketplaces charge per orderoften 30–40% once fees and promotions land
- net margin an independent restaurant runs on
- 3–5%net margin an independent restaurant runs onone app order can erase the profit on the plate
- of diners say they would rather order direct
- ~67%of diners say they would rather order directthe demand is already there; the channel is not
Why we exist
The best restaurant on the street can still lose money on a busy night
Delivery marketplaces solved something real. They put small restaurants in front of people who had never heard of them, and they took the logistics off the owner’s hands. Nobody who has watched a Friday service would argue that was worthless.
But the price turned out to be the two things a restaurant cannot afford to give up: the margin on the order, and the identity of the person who placed it. A restaurant can serve the same guest two hundred times through an app and still have no way to send them a message.
We did not think the answer was another marketplace. Nobody needs a fourth app competing on delivery times. The answer was to make the direct channel — the phone, the WhatsApp thread, the QR on the table, the restaurant’s own link — work as well as the app does. That is a software problem, and it is one that AI has only recently made tractable for a business with no IT department.
So OwnTable does one thing: it makes ordering direct easy enough that guests choose it, and it makes sure that when they do, the restaurant keeps both the money and the relationship.
What we believe
Four things we will not trade away
The guest belongs to the restaurant
A person who has eaten your food, paid for it and come back is your customer — not an audience segment somebody rents to you. Every part of OwnTable is built so that relationship stays where it was earned.
Software should not take a share of the plate
A percentage of every order is a tax that scales with your success and not with our cost of serving you. We charge a flat fee, and we would rather be judged on whether it is worth paying.
Leaving should be easy
Your customer list exports in full, and every integration is connected in your own name, so it keeps working the day you go. A product that has to trap you is a product that stopped earning you.
Say what is not built
There are things competitors sell that we do not have. They are named plainly on this site rather than implied away, because a restaurant that discovers a gap after signing has been sold something, not helped.
Who we serve
Built for the restaurants that feel the commission
A national chain can negotiate its own rate. An independent cannot, which is exactly why the tooling has always been built for the chain. We build for the other one.
Independent restaurants
One location, an owner who is in the building, and margins that a 30% commission genuinely threatens.
Small groups
Three to twenty branches that need one dashboard and consistent guest experience without a corporate IT project.
Restaurants whose guests are on WhatsApp
In the Gulf, South Asia and the diaspora communities we started with, WhatsApp is not a channel — it is how people talk to a business.
How we work
We set it up with you, not for you to figure out
Restaurant software has a well-earned reputation for arriving as a login and a tutorial video. We build the menu with the owner, set the fulfilment rules against how the kitchen actually runs, connect the payment gateway and the WhatsApp number, and sit with the team while the first real orders come through. That is what the one-time setup fee pays for, and it is why restaurants are trading within days.
We are also a small team, which we treat as an obligation rather than an excuse. When something is not built, we say so on this website before you ask. When something breaks, you talk to someone who can change the code.
The company
- Operating entity
- Brands Downtown LLC, Florida, USA
- Live markets
- United States, the Gulf, Pakistan
- Languages
- English and Arabic, full right-to-left
- Contact
- sales@owntable.io
Our data-protection commitments, the list of subprocessors we use, and our terms are all public — see subprocessors and privacy.
Come and see whether we are right about your restaurant
Fourteen days, everything switched on, and we build it with you. No obligation at the end of it.