Why we built Suparota — and what we're still angry about.

I've been building rotas since before scheduling software existed. Actual rotas — on paper, pinned to a noticeboard, annotated in biro when someone called in sick. Twenty-five years in hospitality does that to you. You get very good at something you should never have had to get good at.

When software came along, I thought: finally. And for a while, it was better than the biro. But it was never built for us. It was built for offices. For teams where people stay. For environments where a "shift swap" is a calendar invite rescheduled in Outlook, not a FOH manager ringing six people at 7am because the opener just texted in.

The per-user pricing model is what finally broke me. Here's the maths: hospitality has around 30% annual staff turnover. In some venues, it's higher. You hire someone, you add them to the system, you pay for their seat. They leave six weeks later. You hire someone else. Another seat. The software company counts this as growth. You count it as a problem you're paying twice for.

I once sat with a GM at a 40-cover restaurant — a good venue, well-run, doing proper food — and we counted her per-user software bill over twelve months. She'd paid for 67 "users" that year. She had 14 full-time staff.

And then there's the paywall problem. Every scheduling tool has some variant of the same trick: put the features you actually need behind the next tier. Auto-scheduling? Enterprise. Tronc calculations? Premium. Export to payroll? That'll be a conversation with our sales team. You end up paying for the basic tier, then the middle tier, then realising the thing you bought it for costs 40% more than you budgeted.

I have a principle I've applied to every kitchen I've ever run: every selling price has to have a justifiable cost price. If you can't explain why something costs what it does, you shouldn't be charging it. The software industry, frankly, has forgotten this.

So we built Suparota.

£50 per venue per month. Not per user. Per venue. That covers every staff member you hire, fire, and rehire. It covers split shifts, tronc, availability management, labour cost reporting, and every feature we build from here. No tier negotiations. No upgrade conversations. No gotchas.

We grow when your venues do. That's the alignment we wanted. That's the business we built.

If you're reading this at 11pm on a Sunday finishing the rota for next week — give us 28 days. No credit card. No sales call. If it doesn't work for you, walk away, no hard feelings. If it does, you know where we are.