Setup is intentionally minimal. Connecting Square is one click on Square's own page, no new account or password, and takes about a minute. Your only ongoing task is putting out the branded table tents and coasters we supply; guests scan the QR code, rate the dish, and the data flows to your dashboard automatically. There's nothing for your staff to install or maintain, and editing your menu in Square re-syncs on its own. SmackLip is actively working to enable connection to Toast, Clover, Resy, and OpenTable.

The pilot is free, with no commitment during the pilot. When we reach general availability, the standard rate is $99/month, but as a founding pilot site you lock in the founding rate of $79/month for as long as you remain a partner. You're also never charged to connect Square or to receive the dashboard during the pilot.

SmackLip doesn't compete with those, it shows you something they can't. Yelp and Google average your whole restaurant into a single star rating, so a 4.3 never tells a chef which dishes pulled the average up and which dragged it down. SmackLip rates dishes, not restaurants, on a structured rubric (Salt, Acid, Heat, Doneness and more), giving you a per-dish read you can act on at the kitchen station.

The rubric is designed to prevent exactly that. Diners rate on structured taste axes rather than writing free-text rants, so one off night doesn't become a permanent 1-star. Because ratings are structured and tied to verified taste profiles, the system filters far fewer ratings as suspect, roughly 1.3% versus around 18% on free-text sites, which makes the signal both fairer to you and harder to game.

The Square connection is read-only and scoped to your menu only: items, prices, and photos. It never touches payments, orders, or customer data, and you can revoke access at any time. The integration is built and verified end-to-end against Square's sandbox before it ever touches live data, so connecting is low-risk.

No. Per-dish data is yours to see, shown anonymized in aggregate, never sold, and never used for cross-restaurant ad targeting. Per-dish revenue is visible only to the restaurant that owns it, never to other restaurants and never to diners, and that boundary is enforced at the API layer, not just by policy.

There are already 3,100+ restaurants seeded across the US, and the app is in TestFlight beta with Android in testing ahead of a mid-to-late July 2026 public launch. More importantly, every profile and rating a guest creates by scanning your table tent carries straight over to your dashboard when you go live, so being early means you accumulate dish data before competitors even start.

Fair concern. A few facts to weigh: SmackLip is an incorporated Delaware C-Corp with a filed U.S. provisional patent on the rating method, the Square integration is already built and sandbox-verified, and the partner dashboard is live behind a real owner login today. The pilot carries no commitment and no cost, so your downside is limited to the few minutes it takes to set out table tents, while the upside is a founding-partner rate and a head start on dish-level data.

There's almost nothing for staff to learn. Diners self-serve: they scan, rate, and get matched picks without any staff involvement. If you choose to run offers, composing a taste-matched “Tonight only” promotion takes about 30 seconds, and redemption is a simple in-app flow. The dashboard is for you to read insights, not a system your team has to operate.

The flow is built to remove friction: guests scan the coaster or table tent, join the open beta on the spot with no invite and no sign-up form, and rate the dish they just ate in a few taps, then immediately get matched picks for next time. That last part is the hook: rating gives the diner something back, which is what keeps them doing it.

Discount apps push blanket deals to everyone and erode margin. SmackLip lets you compose offers by verified taste profile, so a clear-out goes only to diners whose palate matches the dish. SmackLip's modeling puts taste-matched offer conversion at roughly 12–18%, about 4× a blanket discount, which means you can move inventory with far less margin given away.

Offers are optional, and the bigger margin story is waste, not discounts. US restaurants waste an estimated $25–30B of food a year, about 4–10% of food purchased (ReFED / WRI, 2024). SmackLip's Food Waste Toolkit forecasts prep from the demand heatmap and triages waste-risk dishes; in SmackLip's modeling an ~8% waste trim recovers roughly 2–3% margin per plate, before you run a single promotion.

It's arguably more useful for independents. You likely rely on intuition about who your guests are and which dishes work; SmackLip turns that into data, an anonymized aggregate taste profile of your guests, dietary mix, and a day-of-week and group-size demand forecast. Those are decisions a small operator makes constantly, and the dashboard makes them with evidence rather than guesswork.

The pilot's one-click path is built on Square first because the integration is already sandbox-verified, and Toast is next on the same menu-and-orders pattern (with Resy and OpenTable on the roadmap). You can still pilot today using table tents and coasters to collect dish ratings; the financial and revenue panels simply light up later, once your POS connects.

Three things: (1) sign in with Square via the private connect link, one click; (2) set out the branded table tents and coasters we supply; and (3) check your dashboard as the numbers fill in. That's it, there's no app for you to install, no contract during the pilot, and you can revoke the Square connection whenever you want.

Today the panels are populated with demo data so you can see exactly what you'll get, but the data layer is structured to switch to live the moment a POS connects, and because the Square integration is already built and sandbox-verified, that switch is real, not hypothetical. As your guests rate dishes, your panels fill with your own numbers.

From launch, SmackLip commits 1% of revenue to food-bank partners under its 1% Pledge, tying operator success and food-waste reduction directly to fighting food insecurity. For many restaurants that's also a credible, data-backed community story they can share with their own guests.

Completely reasonable. The one thing worth weighing on timing: the founding-partner rate ($79/month vs. the $99 standard) and the head start on dish-level data are tied to joining before the July launch. There's no cost or commitment to start the pilot, so an easy middle path is to set out the table tents now and decide on anything further once you've seen real ratings come in.