A multi-vendor digital loyalty platform for independent South African businesses — coffee shops, salons, restaurants, pet groomers. The ones that would still have paper stamp cards if paper stamp cards worked.
Concepted in February, built in March, first paying vendor live in April. Early, moving deliberately, and building with real customers from day one.
Cape Town · Live nationally · Pre-seed
At a glance
Started
February 2026
First vendor live by April
Product
Multi-vendor digital loyalty
Live in production, nationally
Geography
South Africa
Western Cape go-to-market focus
Business model
SaaS subscription
R249 / R499 / R1,495 per month
Partners
First vendor live
Infinity Coffee · April
Tech stack
Next.js + Firebase
Claude AI for analytics
The thesis
Four observations that underpin what we're building.
Loyalty programmes used to require hardware, integrations, and IT budgets. A smartphone and a QR code now do the job for a tenth of the cost. The independent businesses who've been locked out of good loyalty tooling for twenty years are the ones we build for.
No one wants fifteen paper punch cards in their wallet. Multi-vendor loyalty — one card, every participating business — removes the friction that kills single-vendor programmes. The customer base compounds across the network.
The Starbucks and Woolworths of the world have sophisticated loyalty stacks. A neighbourhood coffee shop or salon typically has nothing — or a paper card that gets lost. Lekka closes that gap at a price point local businesses can actually absorb.
Every paid vendor triggers a monthly contribution to FoodForward SA — roughly 17 meals per vendor per month. It's embedded into the unit economics, not a separate marketing initiative. Impact scales with the business.
What's real today
Here's what exists in production today. Nothing on this list is aspirational.
Customer and vendor flows working end-to-end. Sign-up, stamp collection, reward redemption, broadcasts, AI-generated vendor reports, dashboards — all live in production.
Concepted in February, built in March, first paying partner live in April — Infinity Coffee in Somerset West, running their full loyalty programme on Lekka today.
Next.js 14, Firebase (Firestore, Auth, Cloud Functions, App Hosting), SendGrid for transactional email, Anthropic Claude for AI vendor reports. NFC-ready stamp token architecture for a future native app.
A commission-based agent programme launching in the Western Cape — agents earn R500–R1,500 per paid vendor activation. Lean customer acquisition built around on-the-ground local relationships rather than paid media.
Next up
An agent pilot in the Western Cape — with a view to expanding provincially once the model is proven
A native mobile app with NFC tap-to-stamp (the backend token architecture is already NFC-agnostic)
A revenue model blending SaaS subscription with future transactional and data products
A public vendor directory that doubles as a customer-facing discovery layer over time
Who we'd like to talk to
Send an email. Tell us who you are, what you're looking at, and what you'd want to see. We'll reply within a few days.
Cape Town · South Africa