In August 2016, the first commit was made for a point-of-sale product aimed at the Indian market. The POS launched commercially in 2017 and found its way into real restaurants.
For years it remained closed-source. Some of those installations are still running today. That period was not a detour; it was the education. Restaurant software is tested by long shifts, printer quirks, changing menus, imperfect networks, staff turnover, tax changes, and the need to recover quickly when something goes wrong.
The idea returned with better questions
After nearly a decade around POS software, itsbkm.com revisited the problem. What if the product could keep the lessons learned in commercial restaurants while removing the dependency, opacity, and recurring license pressure that make many systems difficult to own?
That idea became FloCafe: a local-first restaurant POS released as free and open-source software. People began testing, reporting, translating, fixing, questioning, and contributing. A product became a movement, then the beginnings of a wider ecosystem.
The goal is not to make software that looks impressive in a demo. It is to make software people are glad to rely on.
Why we believe the result is special
No honest company can objectively declare itself the best POS for every restaurant. FloCafe is built to earn that reputation differently: by being useful without demanding rent, inspectable without permission, private by default, and shaped by the people who run and improve it.
Its advantage is accumulated context. The project combines years of closed-source market experience with the transparency and shared ownership of FOSS. Features matter, but the deeper product is judgment: knowing which workflows need to be fast, which failures need a recovery path, and which data should never be taken for granted.
From one POS to the FloPOS family
FloCafe is now the restaurant product inside FloPOS. FloRetail and FloSalon are in the pipeline. FloAdmin provides optional cloud services, while OrderFlow is intended to bring aggregator orders into the POS and RevFlo provides companion revenue reporting.
The boundary remains deliberate: local products should work locally. Cloud is disabled by default. People who want OrderFlow, RevFlo, or future connected services can choose to enable them with a clear purpose.