Coober Eats is a full four-sided food-delivery platform — customer, restaurant, driver & admin — built specifically for Coober Pedy, an outback town of 1,800 people where the big players don't operate.
Same architecture as Uber Eats, scaled down & tuned for desert logistics, dust storms & long radio-silent driveways.
Uber Eats won't operate in a town of 1,800. The miners, dugout-dwellers & travellers passing through still want a burger delivered after a 14-hour shift. Coober Eats fills that gap.
Coober Eats is a full four-sided food-delivery platform — customer ordering, restaurant fulfilment, driver dispatch & an admin console for the town operator.
Same shape as Uber Eats: customer browses → restaurant accepts & cooks → driver picks up & delivers → admin oversees the city. Every state change is mirrored across all four surfaces in realtime.
Tuned for the realities of Coober Pedy: spotty mobile coverage (offline-first ordering & driver app), long underground driveways (driver gets a "honk & wait" mode), dust storms (auto-pause dispatch), and a tiny driver pool (smart batching).
Built solo end-to-end & running a closed pilot with a handful of local restaurants & drivers while I tune the operations.
A web ordering app for customers, a tablet POS for restaurants, a native delivery app for drivers, and a town-wide admin console. Every state change ripples through all four in realtime.
Customer web & iOS app: browse, customise, pay, track. Auto-detects whether you're at your house, a dugout, or in a caravan park.
Restaurant tablet POS, driver Android app & an admin console showing every order, driver & restaurant on one map. Dust-storm dispatch pause built in.
Customer, restaurant, driver & admin each get their own app, designed for the role & the device they actually use it on.
Coober Pedy's mobile signal drops on most of the highway. Customer browsing, restaurant order entry & driver pickup confirmation all work offline and sync when signal returns.
BoM dust-storm warnings auto-pause dispatch. Underground dugouts get a "honk & wait" pickup mode. Tiny driver pool gets smart batching so two orders for the same direction stack automatically.
Each feature was earned by a real situation we hit in pilot — a dust storm, a flat battery, a dugout 80 metres up a driveway.
Customer web + iOS: cuisine filters, dietary, repeat-orders.
Live map: cooking · picked-up · arriving, driver ETA per minute.
Restaurant tablet: queued · cooking · ready columns + audio.
Auto-assign driver from pool; batch when same-direction.
Native Android app with offline tiles & honk-and-wait mode.
Per-order split: restaurant · driver · platform · GST.
Every order, driver & restaurant on one town overlay.
BoM warning → auto-pause new orders + alert active drivers.
Twilio fallback for every order milestone if data drops.
Customers carry a light-mode ordering app that works on weak signal. Drivers carry a dark, offline-first native app built for one-handed use behind the wheel.
Browse 14 local restaurants, see live ETAs, customise & pay. Address auto-detected for dugouts, caravan parks & mining houses.
Tablet POS chimes; kitchen accepts in one tap, sees the queue. Auto-rejects if cook queue > 12 min unless restaurant overrides.
Nearest available driver auto-assigned with same-direction batching. Driver app rings; one tap to accept & navigate.
Offline-first nav with cached tiles; honk-and-wait mode for long dugout driveways; delivered with one swipe.
Stripe splits the order: restaurant payout, driver fee, platform commission, GST — all to right accounts within minutes.
Real-time map of every active order; auto-pause on dust storms, alerts when drivers go quiet, daily GMV reports for council.
You don't need a billion-dollar valuation to build like Uber Eats. You just need 14 restaurants, 6 drivers & a postcode the big guys won't touch.Pasan W. · Founder & sole builder · Coober Pedy
Closed pilot running across Coober Pedy with 14 restaurants, 6 drivers & growing customer base — built solo, end to end.