Cigar Lounge OS, one system to run the whole lounge

The client from Florida wanted to build a product for cigar lounge owners: a register, a backend and an app for their guests. A cigar lounge has its own quirks: a regular keeps a tab open for the whole evening and moves from the bar to the armchairs, every tobacco sale needs an age check and a separate tax line, and the stockroom is a humidor. The market leaders' generic registers (Toast, Square, Lightspeed) can run a place like this, but only when bent to fit it. What was missing was something built to measure, so owners worked around generic systems or stayed on paper.

For the client this was first of all a business venture, an investment. The goal wasn't to run a single lounge but to build a finished, multi-tenant product (each lounge with its own isolated data) that he could sell to cigar lounge owners across a market the big POS players had ignored. That's why it had to do more than manage sales and the humidor: it needed strong marketing tools (paid event reservations, promotions, a loyalty program, a direct channel to guests) that make the product attractive to owners who want to attract and keep regulars.

The product is aimed at the US market, where cigar lounges are a distinct, established culture. That shapes how it works: 21+ age verification on tobacco sales, excise tax split to local rates, and pricing in dollars. It is being rolled out to lounges across the States (Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas) and sold through its own product site, cigarloungeos.com, with subscription tiers for owners.

I built an ecosystem of three applications on one shared backend: a tablet register for the staff, a web dashboard for the owner and a mobile app for the guests. All three work on the same data, so what happens at the bar shows up in the owner's dashboard right away. Every lounge on the platform has its own, isolated data.

The register also works without internet. A sale is saved on the device first and syncs with the server in the background once the connection is back. When the network dies mid-evening, receipts keep printing and no transaction is lost. The staff work on a floor plan that mirrors the actual room: the owner draws the table layout in the dashboard, and the register shows which tables have open tabs. A tab opened at the bar can be closed at an armchair. Age checks and the tobacco tax line are part of the checkout flow, and every inventory movement is recorded permanently, so shrinkage shows up in the history.

The lounge also earns outside the room. The owner publishes events with paid reservations and seat limits, runs promotions and a QR-code loyalty program, and answers reviews. Guests use their own app to find a lounge nearby, book seats for events, buy and sell cigars on the marketplace and learn about cigars in the education module.

I did the whole thing alone: the design, the code of all three applications and the deployment.

The system is fully finished. The client is now running a waitlist at cigarloungeos.com, signing up lounge owners ahead of the rollout.