Catalogue and pricing rules
Products, categories and pricing rules live in Postgres and are edited from the admin view. A price change is one edit that every till sees immediately — not a message to whoever is on shift.
In production Telegram Mini App
Automaton POS
A full point-of-sale system that lives inside Telegram. No terminal to buy, no tablet to replace, no per-seat licence.
The problem
Small venues get quoted for a POS terminal, a monthly licence per till and a card reader that only works with one processor. Then the tablet dies on a Friday night and the venue is back to pen and paper.
What we built
Automaton POS runs as a Telegram mini app. Any phone the staff already own becomes a till. State lives server-side in Postgres, so a lost phone loses nothing, and a new device is authorised in seconds.
Capabilities
What it actually does
Every item below is a feature of the running system, not a roadmap.
Open tabs
Open a tab, add to it across a shift, save and return to it later. Tab state is server-side, so any authorised phone can pick up any tab.
Checkout
Close a tab to a sale in one action. Totals, line items and pricing rules are applied server-side, so two devices cannot disagree about a bill.
Staff roles
Roles resolved from the Telegram account, so nobody shares a PIN. Admin actions — editing products, changing settings, writing pricing rules, assigning roles — are refused for non-admin staff at the API, not hidden in the UI.
Signed and audited
Every call carries a Telegram-signed identity that is verified inside Postgres before anything runs, and every API hit is logged. A poked-at request fails exactly like a poked-at screen.
Nightly report
A sales summary is built and pushed to a nominated Telegram chat at 23:30 every night, and today's takings are available on demand from the same app the orders go through.
Under the hood
How it is put together
Nothing exotic. A mini app talking to an action-routed API, with state in Postgres and authorisation checked server-side on every call.
- Runs on your server, against your database, with your credentials
- No per-seat licence and no vendor account required
- Documented at handover, so someone else could take it over
| Front end | Telegram Mini App (WebApp) |
|---|---|
| Backend | n8n webhook, action-routed |
| Data | PostgreSQL |
| Auth | Telegram identity, HMAC verified in Postgres |
| Admin API | Separate endpoint, key + role gated |
| Audit | Every API call logged |
| Reporting | Nightly 23:30 push to Telegram |
Fit
Who this suits
- Bars, cafés and taprooms with a handful of staff
- Market stalls and pop-ups where hardware would not survive
- Anyone paying a monthly per-till licence they resent
Tell us what keeps going wrong
A conversation costs nothing and often ends with us saying automation is not worth it for a given job. That is a useful answer too.