Mesa

Mesa is a free point-of-sale, booking, and analytics platform for neighborhood shops — barbershops, cafes, taquerias, auto shops, tutors, and the independent workers who keep a block running. Shops keep 100% of their price and every tip. Customers pay a small community fee, and that fee builds a treasury the neighborhood governs. EngineerChi designed and built the entire platform, and it now operates as Mesa Treasury LLC.

The Problem

Neighborhood businesses pay to exist. Card processors, booking apps, and delivery platforms each take a cut, and that money leaves the block for good. In Chicago neighborhoods that were redlined in the 1930s, the pattern is the same one the maps created: wealth flows out and very little circulates back. Mesa is built to change where the money goes — without asking a shop owner to change how they work.

How It Works

A shop rings up a sale or takes a booking in Mesa. The customer sees the shop's price plus a small community fee (4% + 30¢). The shop receives its full price and the full tip, paid directly to its own Stripe account. After Stripe's processing cost, the fee is split automatically: 60% to the community treasury and 40% to keep the platform running. Every transfer is recorded, so the treasury balance is public and auditable.

What We Built

1. Point of Sale & Payments
Card, QR, and phone-order checkout built on Stripe Connect, with tipping, no-show deposits, bank transfer (ACH) for large jobs, and Tap to Pay on iPhone. A fee-routing system moves each slice of every payment into dedicated, ringfenced accounts.

2. Bookings & Shop Tools
Calendars, staff and barber accounts, order queues for cafes, estimates for mechanics, and an analytics dashboard with sales, peak hours, and top sellers.

3. Community Layer
Proposals and voting on how the treasury is spent, a neighborhood feed, a local leaderboard, and civic data — potholes, traffic, air quality, and Chicago's historic redlining map — so the app is useful to neighbors as well as shops. Fully bilingual in English and Spanish.

From Chi Coin to Mesa

Mesa began as Chi Coin and Eastside Coin, a community currency on Base L2. Building it taught us what neighborhoods actually need: the treasury, the governance, and the local circulation — not a token that depends on outside liquidity to be worth anything. So we rebuilt around real dollars. One dollar is one dollar, shops get paid the same day as any other card sale, and the community still decides how its treasury is used.

Technology Stack

- Mobile App: React Native, Expo (over-the-air updates)
- Backend: Django, Django REST Framework, Channels (WebSockets), Redis
- Database: PostgreSQL
- Payments: Stripe Connect (destination charges, application fees, transfers, ACH, Terminal)
- Infrastructure: Render, Neon, AWS S3, GitHub Actions

Current Stage

Mesa is submitted to the App Store, with 15–20 Chicago shops lined up for launch on the East Side. Learn more at mesatreasury.com.