Software written for the shop it runs in

Why offline-first, specifically

Most point-of-sale software sold in Pakistan is a browser tab pointed at a server somewhere else. That works in a demo. It works less well at half past eight on a Friday when the DSL drops, the queue is out the door, and the till is showing a loading spinner.

We decided at the start that no part of taking an order would touch the network. The database sits on the shop’s own computer. Prices, stock, recipes and reports are read from it directly. Sync exists, and it is genuinely useful — but it is a background job that catches up later, not a dependency that has to succeed before a customer can pay.

What we chose not to do

We did not build a web app and call it desktop software. We did not add a loyalty programme, table reservations or a customer-facing mobile app, because a fast food counter in a Pakistani market town does not need them and every extra screen is one more thing for a new cashier to get lost in.

We also did not build a crippled trial. The 15-day trial is the complete product with nothing switched off, because a trial that hides the features you are evaluating cannot answer the question you installed it to answer.

How we work with shops

For shops in and around Jhang we install it, enter the menu and train the staff in person. Elsewhere in Pakistan we do the same remotely, usually over WhatsApp and a screen share, which for a single-till shop takes about an hour.

When you call about a problem, you reach the people who wrote the code. That is partly a virtue and partly just the size of the company — but it does mean a bug you report is fixed by someone who can fix it rather than logged by someone who cannot.

Being straight about limits

InFastPOS runs on Windows only. The interface is in English today, though it prints whatever you type, so Urdu item names appear correctly on receipts if your printer supports them. Live central stock across many branches is not what this architecture is best at — a chain that needs that is genuinely better served by a cloud-only system, and we would tell you so rather than sell you a licence.

The other software we run

InFastPOS is not the first till we have shipped. Innobrains Technologies also builds AgroPOS, used by agriculture input dealers from Jhang to Lahore, and MediPOS for pharmacies. Both are offline-first for the same reason this one is.

That matters more than a testimonial: those are running businesses you can ring up. Software sold on promises is easy to write, and a shop deciding where to put Rs 35,000 deserves to check that the people behind it have kept something working for somebody else first.

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