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Directory display
Truck display
Menu display
Map view
Truck live broadcast screen

Street Eats Official

I’m Steven, a veteran and the founder of Buhrn Technologies. With our team I built Street Eats, a live map that helps hungry people find real food trucks, carts, trailers and pop-ups that are open and serving right now. Operators get a simple membership that puts them on that map only when they are actually live.

Food lovers should never pay just to discover. Operators should only pay when the product genuinely helps them get found at lunch.

The first real feedback was not “nice demo.” Operators and eaters started treating it like an everyday lunch tool. That is the moment I went full time. Shipping stopped being a side project and became the job.

In the first week after App Store approval we reached 70 users. We are now kicking off our distribution campaign to grow from there, city by city.

What it does

Street Eats Official is a two-sided food truck app. It is live on the US App Store for iPhone right now, and Google Play is coming in the last weeks of August or early September (this was submitted and is in review with Google Play Store now).

For food lovers it is completely free:

See participating trucks on a live map when they are open and serving
Open menus, photos and details before you walk up
Save favorites
Drop a Ping or Hot Spot so nearby owners can see where people are ready to eat

For truck owners there is the Street Eats Membership powered by RevenueCat:

Publish the truck to the map
Go Live and broadcast your serving location
Manage menus, photos and team
See Hot Spot demand around the truck

Discovery stays free. Membership is how an operator publishes, goes Live and stays visible. The Hot Spot Map is an owner perk. We never put a paywall in front of hungry people.

Judges: download the app, browse the map as an eater, then create an owner account and start the monthly plan (one month free). That trial unlocks Go Live, menus, team and Hot Spot Map (which is currently rolling out in the next couple of weeks after the Google Play Store release). Restore Purchases is right in the app. Cancel from the in-app manage sheet or App Store settings. Access continues through the trial or paid period.

How I built it

We built it on React Native, Expo and TypeScript. Live map and location for eaters. Background location only while an owner has explicitly gone Live. Supabase handles auth, data and realtime. Sign in with Apple and Sign in with Google.

Money runs through the RevenueCat SDK and App Store Server Notifications. Apple charges. RevenueCat is the source of truth. We apply entitlements from those events and never run our own charge clock. The paywall shows StoreKit prices from RevenueCat, not hardcoded copy.

We load-tested billing against the live map on purpose. A renewal burst must not take discovery down during lunch.

Monetization

This is not about unlocking fancy filters for consumers. It is a straightforward B2B membership sold through the App Store because that is how Apple requires digital access on iOS.

We sell two honest plans:

Monthly at $120.99 with the first month free
Six-month at $600

Same membership, just different lengths. An annual option exists in the catalog but we do not push it in the app. Two clear choices beat a cluttered paywall.

Every price on screen comes live from the store through RevenueCat, so the UI and the purchase sheet can never disagree. The “you save” line on the six-month plan is calculated from real prices and we hide it during the free trial. Showing a discount while the first month is free would feel dishonest.

A purchase goes from StoreKit into RevenueCat, then a signed webhook grants or revokes the truck membership on our side. Restore, trials, renewals, billing problems, and expirations all follow RevenueCat. We never run our own charge clock. Stripe is reserved for a future multi-truck business path and stays completely off at launch so we cannot double-bill anyone.

Hungry users are the inventory. We do not tax them. Operators pay for a clear job: be findable when they are actually serving. High price, free first month to lower the risk, six-month option for owners who already trust the product. Extra trucks and menu add-ons can come later as separate entitlements. We shipped the smallest membership that does the job.

Challenges

Shipping a real store app meant dealing with location permissions, privacy labels, Sign in with Apple, account deletion, background location only while an owner has explicitly gone Live, US-only targeting, and App Review itself. We aimed for a July 31 Kansas City launch. Apple approved on August 10. That first public version sits cleanly inside the Shipaton window and we shipped the same day instead of waiting for Android.

Building IAP on a two-sided marketplace was the second big challenge. Eaters stay free forever. Owners pay through the store. Dropping a Stripe checkout for the same membership would break the rules and open the door to double charges. RevenueCat plus a fail-closed entitlement system is how the money and the map stay perfectly in sync.

Writing copy that stays true took real work. Intro offers and storefront prices are not identical for every person. We spent more time making sure an operator sees exactly what they will be charged than we spent decorating the paywall.

Trust sits at the center of everything. No truck owner is going to pay $120 a month for a ghost town of empty pins. The product has to prove a real Live broadcast and real demand through Pings and Hot Spots. Directory apps full of stale locations lose that trust on day one. We designed against that from the start; and are gathering partners right now instead of paying trucks with limited users. We want trucks to help us market and bring users onboard; this should be free for those loyalists that help us succeed early on.

What I learned

RevenueCat is the contract between Apple, the client, and our database. If that contract is sloppy, an operator disappears from the map on a retry.

Free for demand, paid for supply is the only model that matches the inspiration. Paywalling hungry people would kill the map.

Honest packaging beats a fake “save 80 percent” tile. Hide the discount when the trial makes it a lie.

Ship the smallest membership that does the job, one operator and one truck, then add entitlements later. Do not launch fleet billing on day one.

When people started using it for real lunch, I went full time.

Since launch

The first public version went live on the US App Store on August 10, 2026. We shipped the day Apple approved. iOS is the revenue rail right now. Google Play follows later in this window.

In the first week we reached 70 users. That early signal, plus face-to-face conversations with operators in Kansas City and Conroe Texas, told us people want to use it for real day to day operations.

We threw a public launch party on August 2 at Mainstreet Tavern in Kansas City, before the listing was even live, so operators and eaters could meet the product in the real world. Press and details are at eatonthestreets.com/press. We emailed the prelaunch list the moment the App Store page went live.

Post-release we shipped updates with clearer membership language, better Sign in with Apple, honest empty-city map copy, and faster support tools. Trial-to-paid is the core growth loop we are working with operators right now.

Next we convert more Kansas City and Conroe operators, ship Google Play on the same membership model, and keep the map honest as new cities start to fill in. We are also beginning our broader distribution campaign after this submission.

Design

Look at three surfaces: the live map, the owner Go Live flow, and the owner Hot Spot Map coming after Google Play Store launch, that shows demand as heat instead of a spreadsheet. Dark and light mode, large type, and a paywall that reads like a business receipt: clear price, trial language, and renewal terms, not a consumer gimmick.

Social good

Independent mobile vendors have no fixed storefront. When people cannot find them, food is wasted and the operator loses the lunch hour. Street Eats gives operators control of their status, location and menu, and gives a city a live way to find food that is actually open and serving. It is veteran-founded and built from a real Kansas City problem, not a pitch-deck idea.