⚓ The manifesto

Why I started Captain.Food

I'll be straight with you, because you don't have time and neither do I.

Captain.Food doesn't really exist yet. There aren't dozens of restaurants aboard, no thousands of customers, no pretty growth curve to show you. There's a conviction, a legal framework, a website, and me writing to you. I'd rather tell you right away: I believe you've had enough of being told stories. So here's the real one.

What made me angry

My fight is simple: I want to build public-utility platforms, to stand up to the tech giants who abuse their position.

I've spent years building platforms and marketplaces. I know how they're made — and I know where they squeeze. The plight of gig-economy riders seemed like the right starting point: people grinding away, badly paid, with no protection.

Then I discovered the numbers on the restaurateurs' side. Commissions of 25 to 35% on every order — that shocked me. And what shocked me even more was the loss of control: restaurateurs no longer even know their own customers.

The math is simple. On the big platforms, a €30 dish doesn't bring you €30. It brings you about 21. The missing €9 goes out in commission, in a trade where the margin already comes down to a few points. You cook. They cash in.

The more I looked, the more I saw just one thing: a system where customers, restaurateurs and riders survive and complain about it — everyone, except the big platforms. So I decided to use what I know how to do — build quality software, fast — to fix a problem in society before chasing profit.

The real problem isn't the price. It's the dependence.

We think the problem with the platforms is the commission. That's only part of it. The real problem is that your customers aren't your customers. The platform knows their name, their address, their habits. You don't. The day you leave, you start from zero.

And once you depend on them, they can tighten the screw. The commission goes up? You find out. Your ranking drops? You don't know why. The rules change? You follow. You're no longer the captain of your business. You're a passenger.

What I refuse to do

The temptation, when you launch an alternative, is to do the same thing but nicer at first — then squeeze once everyone is hooked. We've all seen that movie. The friendly service becomes the new tollbooth.

I refuse that. Not out of kindness: by design. Captain.Food is aiming for accreditation as a solidarity-based social utility enterprise (ESUS, a French legal status). It's not a slogan: it's a legal framework that would cap our profit-taking and lock in our purpose. And our course is to become a cooperative (SCIC) — where restaurateurs, riders and citizens will have a say. The day we'd want to drift into what we're fighting, the status would stop us. It's the only safeguard worth having: not a moral promise, a rule.

And so it isn't just one more promise, we're opening our books in public on Open Collective: every euro received, every euro spent, meant to be visible to everyone. The rule binds us; the books prove it to you.

And I want to go even further: for Captain.Food to be a commons, not my property. The code is already open (on GitHub), under the Captain.Food Coopyleft license (a copyleft based on the AGPL, in the spirit of CoopCycle), whose commercial use is reserved for social and solidarity economy structures. And my course is to get it recognized as a digital public good (DPG) — so it's verifiable, and so another city, another band of independents, can take it up and adapt it. That's how you stand up to the giants: not by becoming a little giant in turn, but by making the tool a commons no one can confiscate.

What we're offering you, in plain words

0% commission on your dishes. Always. You keep 100% of the price of what you sell. Your prices, the same as dine-in — no double menu. Your customer base, yours, from the very first direct order. Your channel, under your name.

And above all, you finally get a real home of your own online. Not a listing drowned in a giant's directory, one resto among thousands: your own site, under your own name — yourresto.captain.food, or even your own domain name yourresto.fr if you want it. Your colors, your photos, your world. A site that gets you found, that your customers remember, and that belongs to you. That's what leaving the dependence behind means: no longer renting a spot in someone else's shop window, but having your own.

“So what do you live on?” Good question, and the answer is here, in plain words: never on your back. The service is funded by a pay-what-you-want customer contribution — €0 is fine, no judgment — never a percentage, never on your margin, never a surcharge added for the customer.

And the riders: where the gig economy squeezes them into precarity, we've chosen to pay them better than anyone, here in Tours — with the ambition, in time, to hire them as employees. A fair service starts with people treated right, and we fund it without squeezing anyone (see how we pay for delivery).

Where we are, honestly

We're starting out. In Tours, with a first group of restaurateurs. Not everywhere, not right away: one territory, done well, between independents who know each other. We're building the tool with the first ones aboard — their feedback shapes it. Joining now isn't taking a risk: it's free, no exclusivity, no commitment. It's weighing in on what Captain.Food will become.

Take back your orders.

Captain.Food

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