Food trucks · carts · counters
People are looking for you right now. They just can’t find you.
Flare puts your truck on a live map of metro Detroit, with today’s spot, today’s menu, and a way to tell your regulars where you parked. We never touch a dollar you take at your window.
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Your pin on the map, moved wherever you park today
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Your menu and prices, changed from your phone in seconds
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A message to people who followed you — “we’re at Campus Martius, 30% off till 2”
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A QR code for the window, so the person in line becomes a regular
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No cut of what you sell at your own window. Not 3%, not 1%, not ever.
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No new tablet, no new card reader, nothing to plug in
Where the money goes
What you actually do
The kit
The free sticker makes you findable. The kit makes the truck look like it belongs to something — and every piece of it is a code that tells you which sign actually brought somebody in.
- Weatherproof window seal, 4″
- Counter standee, 5×7 acrylic
The smallest thing that changes anything.
- Both door decals, 24″ cut vinyl
- Weatherproof window seal
- Counter standee
- 100 QR cards
Four surfaces, four separate codes. You’ll know which one people actually scan.
- Window decal
- Counter standee
- Two yard signs
- 100 QR cards
For a fixed door rather than a moving one.
Bring somebody with you
$10 to them, $10 to you
You get an invite code the day you sign up. Anyone who uses it gets $10 off their kit straight away. You get $10 credited to your own account once they’re still here a month later.
Smaller than what a regular service business gets for the same referral — theirs is sized to a job that can be worth hundreds; a truck’s is sized to $29.99 a month and 3% on the orders we actually send you. This number is one we can keep standing behind, every time, to everybody who’s ever gotten it from a friend.
The month is deliberate. It means nobody gets paid for signing up a truck that was never going to show, and it means the credit you get is for somebody who was actually worth having.
A map with twenty trucks on it isn’t worth much to twenty trucks. You know six people who should be on here. That’s not us being clever — it’s just true, and it’s why the credit exists.
Questions people actually ask
So how do you make money off me?
The $29.99. That’s the whole answer for anything you sell at your window.
There is one other case, and it only exists later: if Flare brings you a customer you didn’t already have — their first order, placed ahead through the app — there’s 3% on that order. It has to be a new customer’s first Flare-created order, so we already know Flare is the reason it happened. You still take the money at the window; we just bill our 3% of it on the monthly invoice. If they come back and order from you again themselves, that’s free — Flare gets paid for the introduction, once, not for your regulars. Ordering ahead is not built yet, so right now this is theoretical and you pay $29.99 and nothing else.
Do I have to buy the kit?
No. The window sticker is free and it’s the only thing you need to be findable — we’ll bring it to you or post it, your choice, either way it costs nothing.
The kit exists because one sticker on a window is not the same as a truck with both doors done. Buy it, don’t buy it, or buy it in March when you’ve seen whether any of this works.
What if I have a slow month, or I shut down for winter?
Pause the account for $9 a month and you keep your page, your menu, your reviews and your followers. You come off the live map while you’re paused, which is honest — nobody should drive to a truck that isn’t there.
Post a job or flip yourself back to open and it wakes up automatically. You don’t have to call anybody.
Am I locked into anything?
No contract, no minimum term, no cancellation fee. Cancel from your own console at two in the morning if you like — there’s no retention call.
If you leave, your customers are still your customers. Flare never had them.
Do my customers have to download an app?
No. Everything works in a phone browser — the map, your menu, your page. The app exists for people who want notifications, and it’s optional for them and irrelevant to you.
Will you email my customers behind my back?
No. You are the only one who can send anything to people who follow you. Flare doesn’t market to your list, doesn’t sell it, and doesn’t rent it to the truck parked next to you.
People opt in themselves, every message carries an unsubscribe link that actually works, and messages are held outside quiet hours. Three complaints and the sending is suspended until a person looks — that rule protects you as much as them.
Who else is on it? Is this empty?
It’s new, and it would be insulting to pretend otherwise. The live count of businesses is on the front page and it isn’t a marketing number — it comes straight out of the database.
The honest pitch for signing up now: the first hundred businesses get a permanently better rate than anyone who comes after, and food trucks are the ones we’re building the customer side around first, because you bring a crowd with you and a furnace repair man doesn’t.
What if Flare goes under?
You keep trading, because nothing you rely on runs through us. Your money never did, your customers were always yours, and your menu is a list you already had.
Ask that question of anyone who wants to process your payments and see whether the answer is as short.
What do you need my licence for?
Because a stranger is deciding whether to eat from a truck they found on a map. “Verified” on your page means somebody actually looked at your food service licence and your commissary letter, and it expires when they do — so it can’t quietly become a lie.
We don’t publish the documents. Just the fact that they checked out, and the date.
I already have Instagram. Why do I need this?
Instagram shows your post to a fraction of the people who follow you, whenever it feels like it, and nobody opens it thinking “where is lunch right now”.
Flare is a map of who is open and where they are parked, this minute. Different job. Keep the Instagram.
When does the bill start?
Not yet. Billing isn’t switched on, and while it’s off you are not being charged for anything. When it does turn on you’ll hear it from a person first, with notice — not from a card statement.
What isn’t built yet
Read this part before you sign up, not after
Every other page you’ve been shown this year told you what a thing will do. Here’s what this one doesn’t do, today:
- Ordering ahead doesn’t exist. People can see your menu. They can’t order from it yet. That’s the next thing being built, and a new customer’s first order is the only thing the 3% ever applies to.
- The phone app isn’t in the stores yet. Everything works in a browser today. Apple’s review takes weeks and isn’t on our clock.
- Billing is switched off. Which means it’s free right now, and it also means the day it switches on is a real day that will happen.
- There aren’t many customers yet. That is the actual reason to sign up in September rather than next April — the trucks who are on the map while we’re putting it in front of people are the ones people find first.
Four minutes. No card. Pick Food truck when it asks what you do — that’s what puts you on this deal instead of the contractor one.