The challenge
Independent Indian hospitality runs on WhatsApp threads and paper registers. A homestay in the hills, a hostel in the city, a dhaba attached to a campsite — the owner is checking in a guest, running a café tab, and chasing a payment, usually on a phone, often with patchy signal and staff spread across a property. Chill Bills arrived with the product designed and the market understood. What they needed was the thing underneath: a real backend, real APIs, and an admin their team could operate — as an MVP, fast enough to put in front of properties.
Our approach
The client came with a complete design mockup, so we did not redesign it. Our job was to make it real: one React Native codebase covering Android, iOS, and a PWA, wired to a Laravel API layer with a Vue 3 admin panel behind it for the operators.
The spine of the product is check-in to bill. A guest's government ID is captured with the camera and the booking fills itself in rather than being typed. Café and table orders attach to the room's running bill automatically. The bill goes out itemised over WhatsApp with a one-tap UPI link, or prints to a Bluetooth receipt printer at the counter — because Indian hospitality is cash, UPI, and walk-ins at the same time.
Staff rarely share a room, so the app cannot make them shout across one. We used Laravel Reverb for WebSockets, pushing order and booking state to every staff login as it changes — the person taking an order at a table and the person making it in the kitchen see the same thing at the same moment, across roles and across properties.
The rest is built for the reality of the job: role-based staff access, multiple properties under one account, AI-assisted menu onboarding so a café doesn't hand-type its menu, and returning guests remembered along with what they usually order.
The outcome
Chill Bills shipped as a working MVP across Android, iOS, and the web, with the full loop closed — a guest can be checked in from a camera scan, order at a café table, and receive an itemised bill with a UPI link over WhatsApp, without the property touching a paper register.
The client owned the design and the market insight; we owned the engineering underneath it. That is a clean way to run an MVP — nobody re-litigating decisions the other side had already made well.