Ownership
Owned by the restaurants that use it
Every big reservation platform is owned by a company that makes money from your diners. Freeheld is built the other way around: open source, and being formed as a cooperative whose members are the restaurants themselves.
A cooperative
Restaurants that buy a license become members. One restaurant, one vote. The co-op exists to run the book well and cheaply for its members, not to sell them to anyone.
Open source
The code is public under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL-3.0). Anyone can read it, run it and improve it. Nobody can take it private.
Your data, portable
Guests, reservations and history export in one click, any day. You stay because it works, not because leaving is hard.
Why a cooperative
Reservation software keeps getting bought by companies whose real customer is the diner: Booking Holdings owns OpenTable, American Express bought Resy and then Tock, DoorDash bought SevenRooms. In each case the restaurant becomes inventory. A cooperative cannot be flipped that way, because the restaurants own it.
There is long precedent for businesses owning the tools they share. Ace Hardware has been owned by its retailers since 1976. Franchisees of large chains run their own purchasing co-ops. We are applying the same idea to the reservation book.
How membership is planned to work
- Your $1,000 license is your membership. One payment per location buys lifetime use of the software and a stake in the co-op.
- One member, one vote on the board and on the big decisions.
- Surplus goes back to members or into lower costs, not to outside investors.
- An asset lock. The bylaws will forbid selling the software or member data out from under the members. (A cautionary tale: True Value was a retailer co-op until it sold control to private equity in 2018, and went bankrupt in 2024. The lock exists to make that impossible here.)
The cooperative is being formed now under California law. Final membership terms will be in its bylaws, which members will be able to read before they join. Founding restaurants will be its first members.
Why the AGPL license
Open source alone is not enough: a funded company could copy open code, add to it, and sell it back as a closed product. The AGPL closes that door. Anyone who runs a modified version of Freeheld as a service must publish their changes under the same license. The work stays in the commons.
For a restaurant, it means one simple thing: the software you depend on can never disappear behind a paywall or an acquisition. If Freeheld the organization ever stopped, the code would still be here, and you or anyone you hire could keep running your book.
What we will never do
- Charge a fee per cover.
- Take a cut of your deposits or no-show charges.
- Market your guests other restaurants, or sell their data.
- Make exporting your data hard.
Become a founding member.
Start with a free 30-day trial. Your license is your membership.
Start your free trial