For 20-year-old UCT student Dylan Steiner, the frustration was familiar: wanting to enjoy a meal with friends without having to worry about whether the food was worth the price.<\/p>\n
A night out in Cape Town had increasingly become an expensive luxury for Steiner, who was shocked by the prices being charged at some restaurants<\/a>.<\/p>\n Instead of simply complaining about it, the Johannesburg-born student decided to build something that could help people make better choices.<\/p>\n The result is Bites, a food-focused app that allows users to discover restaurants, compare food prices and share what they are eating with others.<\/p>\n Steiner, who has been working on the app for about two months, taught himself how to code and developed the platform himself.<\/p>\n \u201cThis 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n From student frustration to a new app<\/p>\n The idea was born from Steiner’s own experiences as a student trying to find affordable places to eat in Cape Town.<\/p>\n While he loves the city, particularly its diversity and nightlife, he said the cost of going out had become one of its biggest drawbacks.<\/p>\n \u201cBeing a student myself, it’s so hard to go out on a night out, and restaurants are charging ridiculous prices for food<\/a>,\u201d Steiner said.<\/p>\n He and his friends would regularly search for restaurants offering reasonably priced meals, but finding those hidden gems was not always easy.<\/p>\n Steiner said he became frustrated with paying large amounts for food that did not necessarily justify the price.<\/p>\n He wanted a way of knowing what a meal would cost, and whether people considered it good value, before spending the money.<\/p>\n That frustration eventually became the foundation for Bites.<\/p>\n The app currently features between 300 and 400 restaurants across Cape Town. Steiner said he personally visited more than 400 restaurants to manually enter their menus and prices, giving users options from the moment the platform launched.<\/p>\n One student, one idea and hours of self-taught coding<\/p>\n Steiner said the app has been a largely one-man operation, from its concept and design to its coding.<\/p>\n \u201cI’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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Steiner estimates that he spent about five hours a day working on Bites over the past two months.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The total development cost, he said, was between R2,000 and R4,000.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n One of the biggest price differences he has personally encountered involved a meal that helped inspire the concept in the first place.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n He said the cheaper meal came with a larger portion and left him questioning why consumers would automatically choose the more expensive option.<\/p>\n