We built the system these places deserved.
ZidPay is a complete operating system for restaurants — built in Fès, for the way restaurants actually run in Morocco. Here’s how four regulars turned a recurring frustration into a product.
We didn’t start with a business plan. We started as four people who spend far too much time in cafés and restaurants — eating, meeting, getting work done.
When you sit in the same places that often, you stop noticing your coffee and start noticing how the place runs. An order carried to the kitchen from memory, then a trip back because a detail got dropped. The owner at midnight, printing reports out of three different systems, trying to work out why the numbers don’t line up. The same small things going wrong, again and again, in places we actually liked.
What got to us was that these were good restaurants. The people were good at their jobs. The tools were the problem. A basic POS and a pile of spreadsheets isn’t a system — it’s just more work piled on people who already work hard.
We’d all lived abroad at some point, so we knew how smooth this could be, and there was no reason it couldn’t work here too — in our own languages, built the way things actually work in Morocco.
“Zid” (زيد) means “add” in Darija. Put it next to “Pay” and that’s the whole idea: help the places we love grow.
Most owners don’t need another app. They need to get home at a decent hour.
ZidPay is one system that runs the whole restaurant — the floor, the kitchen, the stock, the cash, the staff, the delivery. It’s all connected: when a table orders, the kitchen already knows; when a dish goes out, the stock moves on its own; when the day ends, the report is already there and the cash adds up.
QR ordering at the table, kitchen display screens, table and terrace service, stock that deducts itself, staff scheduling and time clock, delivery with cash tracking, reservations, and end-of-day reports that show you which dishes actually made you money. All in one place, in French and Arabic, with Moroccan VAT receipts built in. And it keeps working offline — a full dining room shouldn’t grind to a halt because the internet dropped for ten minutes.
Four people, four parts of the same problem.
We came together more by luck than design — four people who each happened to own a different piece of the same problem.
The one who could actually build it. He turned years of sitting in these places and noticing things into a platform where everything connects and an order moves through the whole system without anyone re-typing it.
Runs the money side, and is exact about it to a degree the rest of us find slightly intimidating. That’s why the numbers hold up. One ledger, right down to the centime.
The one who talks to owners — and, more to the point, listens to them. He picks up on what goes wrong in the middle of a packed Friday night and makes sure it doesn’t stay broken.
The one who makes people care. She gives ZidPay its voice — clear, direct, and warm, the way good hospitality here actually feels.
We still spend most of our time in cafés and restaurants. The only difference is that a few of them run on ZidPay now. We’re not in a rush to be everywhere — we’d rather be the thing Moroccan restaurants reach for first, starting with the places we already know and like.
Want to see it for real?
Open the live demo — a real restaurant, real data, no signup.