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Comment by njharman | Hacker News Reader

I don't want lunch delivered. Lunch is time to leave the office and socialize with team members I'm not working with all day.

Bill splitting is the service I want.

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Leaving the office is nice. But who among us has never had this conversation?

"Let's get lunch."

"Okay, where?"

"Chinese."

"Ugh. I don't feel like that today. How about that sandwich place?"

"We were just there on Monday!"

"Yeah. Feel like a burger?"

"That place isn't very good. Kind of expensive."

"Wish there was something new to try."

Then everyone goes back to work.

Then 15 minutes later you realize, ah, fuck, still hungry!

So the appeal with ZeroCater is that with no effort, boom, there's food. And it's often new food. And it's tasty. And you give no effort to thinking about it. So lunch is just a nice, social thing that lasts as long as you want it to without being prolonged by bad service, slow kitchen, whatever.

It's a pretty solid deal. Not a bad tradeoff. Picking lunch can be a miserable affair, especially when you work in a place with thin food options.

Oh, and as someone who was once subjected to truly fucking terrible office catering: wow, what a joy it is to get quality food delivered.

Also, food provided in-office is 100% deductible; meals outside are 50%.

Having great food available daily would be a nice hook to bring in open source dev partners, potential employees (especially passive-recruit candidates), potential clients, etc. I know I've gone to Google and Facebook meals on that basis.

Out of curiosity, how do you categorize expenses such that in-office food is covered? I've wondered this before with coffee (getting in-office coffee as deductible, whereas out at Starbucks is 50% at best). Would be interested to learn how you file these expenses for your taxes.

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p15b.pdf

Basically if it's a "de minimis benefit" (generally, self-serve food is always included unless it's absurdly luxury), you're fine.

Serving it on business premises seems to be the key factor, at a dedicated cafeteria.

> Bill splitting is the service I want.

One of my phone app ideas (inspired by demoing Word Lens' real-time video translator over lunch) is a bill-splitting app that uses OCR:

1. Photograph the receipt.

2. OCR the items ordered.

3. User clicks the items to group each person's order. Or even cooler: fling items to the side or corner of the phone screen nearest that person (like a card dealer).

4. The app calculates each item groups' total with tax and tip.

Unfortunately, the market for bill-splitting or tip-calculating apps is probably pretty crowded. <:\

EDIT: I see now that an iPhone app that uses OCR to analyze your receipt already exists, though the reviews say the OCR sucks: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bill-split-ocr/id347826835

Another problem with bill splitting is that at some level, the inefficiency can be used positively; I know I always end up paying extra at meals when I can't pay for the whole thing, if the other people are students or don't have reasonable income. It's a lot easier to do that tacitly when there aren't good bill splitting numbers available.

Depends on the day for me, sometimes this is nice to do, sometimes I just want to spent 10 minutes having something to eat and jump straight back into what I'm doing if I have a flow going or a lot on.

I don't know why you got downvoted. That's a legit concern.

Have you tried https://www.paydivvy.com/ ?

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