Today, we’re launching Open Infinite in private beta for our earliest customers: a first-of-its-kind ordering platform that allows for infinite customization of any ordering surface.
Open Infinite is built on the latest frontier models, and it makes possible something that wasn’t possible even a year ago: a production-grade ordering system that any restaurant can shape to look, feel, and work exactly the way they want without writing a line of code. We believe this is the first step toward eliminating ordering templates from the internet entirely.
Until now, restaurants faced three bad options:
- Use an ordering template. Fast and cheap, but your site looks like everyone else’s.
- Hire engineers and integrate APIs (Olo, LevelUp). Flexible, but expensive to build and brutal to maintain.
- Build everything from scratch. Total control, at a cost that only the largest brands can stomach. When Wingstop dropped Olo, they reportedly spent $50M building their replacement in-house.
With the rapid advance in agentic capabilities, the tradeoffs are gone. You can build the ordering experience of your dreams, customize it infinitely, and skip the $50M bill.
The problem with templates
I’ve built template-based ordering systems before. So here’s what the companies selling them won’t tell you.
Nearly every restaurant technology company offering white-label ordering today is built on a template. Look at five sites they power and you’ll notice they all look pretty much exactly the same. You can change your logo, your brand color, and sometimes your font, but the structure of the site, the layout of the menu, the cart flow, all follows a standard template.
Restaurants don’t want their ordering experience to look identical to the competitor down the street. Templates limit your ability to ship new features, express your brand, and lock you into a pre-determined set of functionality. When template-based companies tell you that customization will hurt your conversion rate (that you should want the template), that claim isn’t true. It’s self-serving to say these things. A single template is easier for them to scale and manage. It has nothing to do with what’s best for you.
The *historical* problem with customization
Historically, the antidote to templates was hiring a team of engineers. Those engineers would typically build on a platform like Olo, using its APIs to manage menus, build carts, ingest orders, process refunds, set up promotions, and take payments. And if you didn’t want to build on someone else’s APIs, you built everything yourself and maintained it forever.
For most restaurants, neither path was economically viable. And even for the brands that could afford it, the result was a system that’s incredibly hard to change once implemented. Every future tweak comes with an engineering bill and months of product, design, and engineering sprints.
Open Infinite: The way forward
Open Infinite is our answer. It gives restaurants all the production-grade logic an ordering system needs (menu management, delivery integrations, payments, carts, promotions) without the constraints of a template sitting on top.
This is a fancy way of saying: you can build a fully customizable online ordering system on Open in minutes, and make changes by describing them in plain text. What historically took years and tens of millions of dollars can be done in an afternoon. Your ongoing maintenance cost is zero. And future changes don’t come with engineering bills since any non-engineer on your team can make them in minutes.
Open’s Guardrails
One of the hardest parts of building a system like this is making sure customization can never break anything. We support single customers doing tens of millions in digital sales. Avoiding breaking changes is table stakes.
Traditionally, this was the job of the engineering team you hired: end-to-end testing of every critical flow before anything shipped. Open had to build that capability from scratch, automatically, for any possible ordering surface our restaurants create. Every change you describe is verified against your live flows before it goes out so you can redesign your checkout without wondering whether orders will still process after the change is deployed.
Availability
Open Infinite is available today in a private, invite-only beta for select customers. Soon, we’ll release it more broadly and let anyone set up a fully customizable ordering system on top of Open’s platform.
You now have a $50M build at your fingertips. It’s yours to claim.
