A juice chain gave its SaaS vendors an ultimatum. Half said no.
Gary Thomas, CEO of Keva, an eight-unit juice chain, sent the same message to every software vendor on his stack: cut your rate or get cut. About half negotiated. The other five told him no. So he replaced them with software he built himself using Claude.
The result is a program called UseFroot (Framework of Routine Operations and Operating Tasks). It covers onboarding and training, daily checklists, inventory management and forecasting, and staff communications. Thomas expects UseFroot to save Keva $30,000 per year in subscription fees. He’s already given it to two other restaurants for free and plans to eventually sell it for $20 to $50 per month.
The bigger pattern
Keva is a small operation, but the same logic is playing out at massive scale. Bloomberg reported last month, citing a leaked internal presentation, that Starbucks plans to bring software development in-house using AI to replace products from IBM and Microsoft. The expected savings: $40 million this year. IBM and Microsoft stocks dipped the following day before recovering. Starbucks didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The vendor side of the argument
Restaurant tech companies aren’t panicking, at least not publicly. Sterling Douglass, co-founder and CEO of Chowly, said he’s seen no clients cancel in favor of a vibe-coded alternative. He believes AI will follow the same arc as computers in the 90s and the internet in the 2000s: significant shift, not total replacement. His take is that AI tips the build-versus-buy debate slightly toward build, but vendors still offer expertise and infrastructure that’s hard to replicate in-house.
Toast CMO Kelly Esten made the counterpoint plainly: the company invests hundreds of millions of dollars a year in R&D, with engineering teams focused specifically on uptime, security, hardware integration, and payment processing. Toast’s annualized recurring run rate grew 25% to $2.4 billion last quarter, and it added a record 9,500 net new locations. Its AI marketing agent, Toast IQ Grow, became the fastest-growing new product the company has ever launched.
Research analyst Stephen Sheldon of William Blair added a useful distinction: vendors with deep end-to-end workflow integration are probably safe. Point solutions handling a single task (onboarding, loyalty) are more exposed. Meanwhile, Marriott recently signed a long-term contract with Agilysis for property management software, moving in the opposite direction from Starbucks entirely.
The operator takeaway
Thomas spends $100 per month on Claude. He has limited coding experience. When he gets stuck or something breaks, he asks Claude to explain the problem at a fifth-grade level and fix it. The database behind UseFroot currently runs on a free platform, so the software costs nothing to operate for now.
“If a lowly restaurant operator like myself can build his own apps, you’ve got millions of people doing the same thing. In my opinion, in the next five years, it’s going to send shockwaves through the software industry.” — Gary Thomas, Keva
Y Combinator reported last year that a quarter of its winter class startups relied heavily on vibe coding. For operators running lean stacks with several single-purpose SaaS subscriptions, this story is worth watching closely.
I’m founder of BizStack at Cagri Sarigoz LLC and a passionate advocate for entrepreneurs.
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