About
Tafula is made by Shepard Dube through Ophirtech, a small South African software company. There is no office in another country deciding what a kota shop in Soweto needs.
Every independent restaurant in South Africa now has the same quiet problem. The delivery apps brought them customers, and then kept charging for those customers long after they had become regulars. Nobody will say in public what the commission is. Restaurant owners say it is a quarter to a third of the order, and the apps have declined to tell journalists otherwise.
The big chains answered by building their own ordering. A single kota shop, a bunny chow place, a braai spot with four tables cannot hire a developer to do the same. So they pay, order after order, for customers who already knew where to find them.
Tafula gives that restaurant its own ordering page, at its own address, in its own colours, for one flat fee in rand. The regular who orders every Friday comes through the restaurant's own door, and the restaurant keeps the whole order.
Most of what makes Tafula different is what it refuses to do.
A percentage of every order means our income grows when your work grows, and that is the wrong way round. One fee, the same in a quiet month and a good one. The pricing page says what it is.
Delivery drivers are the real cost in the delivery business, and the real reason the apps charge what they charge. A customer who orders ahead and fetches it hot gets the food faster, pays less, and the restaurant keeps everything. Delivery can come later; collection is where the margin is.
The power goes, so there is a switch for that and anyone on shift may press it. Data is expensive, so the ordering page loads light. People pay at the counter, so there is no card step in the way. The privacy notice is written to POPIA, not adapted from somewhere else.
No service fee, no booking fee, no tip prompt on the customer. The menu price is the price. We would rather be paid by the restaurant, plainly, than by the customer, quietly.
Shepard Dube builds Tafula and runs Ophirtech, which also makes software for South African law firms. The same habits carry over: money handled to the cent, records that show who did what, and a product that is honest about what it does not do yet.
When you email, you are writing to the person who built the thing. When your menu is loaded, it is loaded by hand, and checked against the photograph you sent. When something breaks, you will not be routed through a ticketing system in another time zone.
That is also the honest limit of it: Tafula is small, and we say so. What we have built is on the product pages, what we have not built yet is on the pricing page, and neither list is padded.
Questions, your menu, or something you think we got wrong.