A R130 chicken meal was enough to send UCT student Dylan Steiner looking for a cheaper option. What he found across the road cost R79 and eventually helped inspire an app aimed at helping Cape Town diners find out what they will pay before choosing where to eat.
The 20-year-old has launched Bites, a food app that allows users to compare restaurant prices, find cheaper places to eat and share what they have ordered.
Steiner built the app himself after becoming frustrated by how much it was costing him and his friends to eat out in Cape Town.
The Johannesburg-born student taught himself to code and spent about five hours a day over two months developing Bites, which now carries information for between 300 and 400 Cape Town restaurants.
Steiner said he personally visited more than 400 restaurants to capture menus and prices before launching the platform.
“This app is something that I’ve been working on for the past few months, and I’m really excited that it’s finally out there and at launch,” he said.
From student frustration to a new app
The idea was born from Steiner’s own experiences as a student trying to find affordable places to eat in Cape Town.
While he loves the city, particularly its diversity and nightlife, he said the cost of going out had become one of its biggest drawbacks.
“Being a student myself, it’s so hard to go out on a night out, and restaurants are charging ridiculous prices for food,” Steiner said.
He and his friends would regularly search for restaurants offering reasonably priced meals, but finding those hidden gems was not always easy.
Steiner said he became frustrated with paying large amounts for food that did not necessarily justify the price.
He wanted a way of knowing what a meal would cost, and whether people considered it good value, before spending the money.
That frustration eventually became the foundation for Bites.
One student, one idea and hours of self-taught coding
Steiner said the app has been a largely one-man operation, from its concept and design to its coding.
“I’ve had to learn code by myself, and it’s been such a great journey learning how to code, using AI to help me, teach me and improve the app,” he said.
Steiner estimates that he spent about five hours a day working on Bites over the past two months.
He funded the project himself, using money from debating coaching as well as savings from working in the United States, where he spent the past two years working as a waiter, DJ and chef.
The total development cost, he said, was between R2,000 and R4,000.
The app is currently free, something Steiner said was important because he wants it to remain accessible to students and other people trying to make their money stretch further.
One of the biggest price differences he has personally encountered involved a meal that helped inspire the concept in the first place.
Steiner said he paid R130 for half a chicken and rice at Nando’s before discovering that Crispy King, a restaurant across the same street, was selling a similar meal for R79.
He said the cheaper meal came with a larger portion and left him questioning why consumers would automatically choose the more expensive option.
“I was so angry. I was like, why are people walking into Nando’s when across the street there’s a restaurant who’s doing it as good as Nando’s but at half the price?” he said.
More than just comparing food prices
Bites allows users to upload food photographs and prices, while an algorithm is designed to identify unusual prices and calculate average prices for particular meals.
Prices can also be marked as verified when Steiner or a restaurant has uploaded a menu.
Users are warned when information may be outdated, with Steiner hoping the platform will eventually become largely self-sufficient as more people contribute price information.
The app also goes beyond simply comparing prices.
Its social feed, called Snacking, allows users to see what people nearby are eating, while a budget function allows users to track how much they spend on eating out.
Users can also create plans with friends, organise food outings, keep a food diary and earn points and badges for contributing to the platform.
For Steiner, the ultimate goal is to create a community of food lovers while helping consumers find better value.
He hopes to expand Bites from Cape Town to Johannesburg, Pretoria and other major South African cities before eventually taking the concept overseas.
“I want to be all over SA and I want the app to be the main place people are searching for food,” he said.
Despite the app only recently launching, Steiner said the early response has exceeded his expectations.
He initially hoped to have about 200 users by the end of the year, but said two of his TikTok videos went viral and helped drive downloads.
On its first day, he said the app reached about 160 downloads.
For a young student who had never built an app before, the response has reinforced his belief that the problem he was trying to solve is one many people understand.
Steiner said his advice to other students with ideas is simple: start.
“If you truly believe in an app and you think it solves a problem you have, then just do it,” he said.
For now, Steiner remains a student balancing his studies with a project that has consumed much of his time and energy.
But what began as his own frustration over the price of a meal has grown into an ambitious attempt to change how people discover, compare and experience food.