Local-first: the stack lives in the venue
- The point-of-sale database is stored locally in the venue, with a pull sync roughly every minute and a cache that renders the floor on a cold boot.
- Push-sync with verified persistence, self-healing schema at boot, and an immutable-column guard keep the local and cloud copies consistent.
- No third-party in the deploy path — updates ship LAN-direct.
Through an internet outage
- Orders, cash, and printing keep working when the line to the internet goes down; an offline mutation queue replays in order when the link returns.
- Card processing resumes with the connection — card authorization runs through the processor and picks back up when the internet does.
- Public web-payments — event tickets and pay-links — run in the cloud, decoupled from the venue's box, so online revenue keeps flowing even if the on-site hardware is down.
The resilience boundary is the internet connection. cipher keeps the floor ringing through a WAN outage; it is not a claim about card authorization without a connection.
Hardened Linux kiosk
- Terminals run a declarative, fleet-as-code kiosk build and boot into the point of sale and nothing else — no app store, no third-party or downloadable apps on the device that rings the sales.
- A crash-relaunch supervisor and a fail-closed off-network lock page keep a terminal in a known state.
- Hardening lives at the operating-system layer — one vendor patches and maintains the whole stack, in-house.
Anti-theft: full-disk encryption
- Full-disk encryption with a venue-network-bound unlock — a terminal carried off-premises is a brick, because it can't unlock away from the venue's network.
One-command venue provisioning
- Standing up a new venue is a single command — a fully-configured venue from a schema-validated config file, with database provisioning and a verifier.
- Bare-metal USB provisioning and a documented install runbook for the on-site build.
First-class locations inside the venue
- Bars, kitchen stations, and storage zones are first-class locations with their own counts, PAR levels, stock-ups, and printer routing.
cipher provisions each venue as its own configured deployment. It is a single-venue operating system per site — not a cross-store reporting rollup.
Printing & payments
- Dual-transport ESC/POS printing (TCP and USB) with server-authoritative routing and a custom glyph layer.
- Integrated EMV card entry — chip, tap, and swipe — through a partner merchant processor, plus a hosted payment page for web-payments and pay-links.
Vendor-managed: install, patch, maintain
- cipher installs, patches, hardens, and backs up the stack — you never staff an IT department.
- Remote support is baked in and default-deny — access opens only when the owner has verified the device — with config backup and restore.
Ready to see it on your own floor? Apply for a walkthrough — every install includes a site visit and network confirmation.