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Restaurant SaaS6 monthsTimeline Digital (in-house product)

Timeline Restaurants POS

Free offline restaurant POS for Windows. Tables, dine-in/takeout/delivery, recipe-based inventory, EOD reports, local backup. Ships as a single 96 MB installer.

$0/mo

Software Cost

0%

Card Cut

100%

Offline

01Timeline Restaurants POS: The Challenge

Independent restaurants in the USA pay Square or Toast 2.6% on every card swipe — about $4,800 a year on $15K monthly card sales — and lose service the moment the Wi-Fi blinks. We wanted to ship a free Windows POS that took zero card cut and ran fully offline.

02Timeline Restaurants POS: The Solution

Built a single-installer Windows POS on local SQLite with table management, modifier groups, recipe-based inventory, EOD reports and zip backups. 198+ country presets and full sales-tax configuration. We don't process cards — operators bring whatever merchant account they already use.

03Timeline Restaurants POS: The Results

Released v1.0.0 May 2026 with 13 product screens, 6 dedicated USA landing pages and 11 cross-linked supporting pages. Average installer download time on a home connection: 1–3 minutes. Day-1 indexable JSON-LD: SoftwareApplication, FAQPage, HowTo, BreadcrumbList.

Technology Stack

ElectronWindowsSQLiteNode.jsTypeScriptESC/POS

Services Provided

Custom Software DevelopmentWeb Application Development

Outcomes that mattered

The numbers above are the headline. Below is what they mean for the restaurant saas operations team — what they stopped doing, what they started doing, and what changed for end customers.

$0/mo

Software Cost

Headline metric — measured against the pre-launch baseline.

0%

Card Cut

Captured 90 days post-launch with the same methodology used during discovery.

100%

Offline

Operational impact reported by the client team in their post-launch review.

Why this tech stack

We pick technology based on the production load, the integration footprint and the long-term maintenance reality — not the latest framework on Hacker News. For Timeline Restaurants POS, the stack we chose:

Electron

Production-grade choice for restaurant saas workloads at this scale.

Windows

Production-grade choice for restaurant saas workloads at this scale.

SQLite

Production-grade choice for restaurant saas workloads at this scale.

Node.js

Production-grade choice for restaurant saas workloads at this scale.

TypeScript

Production-grade choice for restaurant saas workloads at this scale.

ESC/POS

Production-grade choice for restaurant saas workloads at this scale.

Common questions about this case

How long did the Timeline Restaurants POS build take?+

6 months. We delivered in 2-week sprints with a working demo at the end of every sprint, so Timeline Digital (in-house product) saw progress continuously.

What technology did Timeline Digital use to build Timeline Restaurants POS?+

Electron, Windows, SQLite, Node.js, TypeScript, ESC/POS. We pick the stack based on the production load, integration requirements and the team's long-term maintenance capacity — not the latest framework on Hacker News.

What industry was Timeline Restaurants POS built for?+

Restaurant SaaS. The patterns we used here transfer to similar businesses with comparable scale and regulatory requirements. Reach out if you operate in this space and want a similar build.

Can Timeline Digital build something similar for our team?+

Yes. We start every engagement with a paid 2-week discovery sprint that produces architecture, scope and a fixed price. Mutual NDA signed on day one, full IP assignment, no agency overhead. Ranges typically run $25K – $250K depending on scope.

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