Why we built FeedbackFountain

It started over bagels.

I have a friend — Jeff — who runs Jeff's Bagel Run, a bagel chain he's grown from one location to thirty-three across the US. Jeff is the kind of operator who moves fast, makes decisions quickly, and doesn't have a lot of patience for things that slow him down.

Over dinner one night, he was venting about his review monitoring software. The bill had just come in. Again. And it was, again, more than the month before — because he'd opened two new locations, and the software charged per location.

He said something I've been thinking about ever since: "Why does my software bill go up every time I succeed?"

It's a good question. The honest answer is: because that's how every tool in the market is built. Per location, per month. Open your 20th restaurant and congratulations — here's your 20th line item. The software companies have decided that your growth is their revenue opportunity.

What I found when I started digging

I started researching the space — partly because Jeff asked if I could build something better, and partly because I was genuinely curious about why nobody had done it differently. What I found surprised me.

Most tools in this space won't show you what they cost until you've sat through a sales demo. I'm talking about serious, established software companies. You go to their website, you try to find a price, and eventually you find a "get a custom quote" button. That's it.

Then I started looking at the contracts. Twelve-month minimums. Auto-renewals. Ninety-day written cancellation notices — meaning if you miss the window by a day, you're locked in for another year. One company charges a $4,000 fee just to exit your contract early. Another has a documented pattern of continuing to charge customers for months after they submit cancellation requests.

I don't think these are bad companies. I think they got caught up in standard enterprise SaaS playbook — hide pricing, lock in contracts, build in switching costs — and nobody thought hard enough about whether that model was right for the people they were actually selling to.

Restaurant operators are not enterprise software buyers. They're busy people running hard businesses on thin margins. They don't have a procurement department. They make decisions at 10pm after a long service, not during a Tuesday morning vendor evaluation meeting.

The other thing I found: delivery platforms were mostly invisible

Here's something that shouldn't have surprised me but did: most review management tools don't monitor DoorDash or Uber Eats reviews. At all.

For a restaurant where 30–40% of orders are delivery — which is pretty normal now — that's a massive blind spot. A customer has a bad delivery experience, leaves a 1-star review on DoorDash, and it just... doesn't exist from the operator's perspective. No alert. No visibility. No chance to respond.

Meanwhile the operator is carefully monitoring their Google rating, not realizing their delivery reputation is quietly accumulating problems.

So we built the thing Jeff asked for

Flat monthly pricing. All five platforms: Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, DoorDash, and Uber Eats. No contract. No sales call to get started. Cancel anytime.

The pricing was an easy decision once I sat down to think about it honestly. Our actual costs don't scale linearly with the number of locations a customer has — they scale with API calls, storage, and compute, which grow more slowly. There's no good reason why a restaurant operator should pay 33x more to monitor 33 locations than 1 location. They shouldn't.

The self-serve thing was also a deliberate choice. Jeff doesn't schedule demos. He also doesn't wait for a callback. If he wants to try a new piece of software, he wants to try it now. That kind of operator — the one who moves fast, makes decisions on the fly, doesn't have time for a sales process — is exactly who we built FeedbackFountain for.

Where we are now

FeedbackFountain is in private beta. Jeff's Bagel Run is our first customer and has been a living test of whether the product actually works at scale across a real multi-location chain. (It does. Thirty-three locations, five platforms, more than 10,000 reviews in the dashboard.)

We're selectively onboarding restaurant chains during the beta — partly to make sure we have the bandwidth to support each new customer well, and partly because founding members get pricing locked in at today's rates forever. We'll raise prices when we officially launch. The operators who got in early won't see that change.

If you're running a multi-location restaurant and tired of the status quo — the hidden pricing, the contracts, the tools that don't cover delivery — I'd love to have you in the beta.

Jeff's catch phrase is "Let's Go." That's basically our product philosophy in two words.