Hello, Inc. (Head Office: Shibuya-ku, Tokyo; Representative Director: Yuki Hariguchi), the company behind Respo, an all-in-one management platform for restaurants, today announced that its core features—reservation ledger, channel manager, POS, mobile ordering, and payment terminals—will be offered across Japan starting May 1, 2026, with zero initial cost, zero monthly fee, and zero customer acquisition fee.
Why Make Everything Free?
One of the structural challenges in restaurant management is that fixed costs and operating expenses continue to weigh heavily on businesses, while the burden of those costs has remained difficult to fully identify and address.
Many restaurants have introduced tools such as reservation ledgers, POS systems, ordering systems, and payment terminals individually, from different vendors, whenever the need arose. As a result, the following issues have emerged:
- Financial cost: Total monthly fees often reach several tens of thousands of yen, and reservations made through gourmet listing sites typically incur customer acquisition fees on a per-booking basis.
- Training burden on frontline staff: Because tools vary from one vendor to another, staff must learn different systems and workflows, creating training and handover costs that are not always visible but consistently accumulate.
- Fragmented data: Reservation, sales, customer, and ordering data remain disconnected, forcing not only management decisions but also day-to-day customer service and recommendations to rely heavily on individual experience and intuition.
Respo addresses these structural issues through a fundamental rethink of pricing.
With zero initial cost, zero monthly fee, and zero customer acquisition fee, Respo will make all of the essential functions required for restaurant operations available free of charge across Japan, significantly reducing cost burdens for everyone from independent restaurants to multi-location operators. In addition, by integrating data into a single platform, restaurants can more easily identify operational challenges and make better decisions not only for revenue growth, but also for day-to-day service and operational improvement.
Not just reducing fixed costs, but building the foundation for higher sales—free for every restaurant. That is the vision behind this move to full free access.
How Respo Helps Increase Sales While Reducing Costs
What Respo delivers is not simply free tools.
By integrating everything restaurants need—from pre-visit reservation and customer acquisition management, to in-store service, ordering, and payment, to post-visit customer follow-up—into a single platform, Respo supports restaurant operations end to end.
With this move to full free access, restaurants will first be freed from a major fixed-cost burden. By unifying tools into one system, the time and effort required for staff training, setup, and operational management can also be significantly reduced.
In addition, by using Respo, data related to reservations, sales, customers, and orders is automatically connected. The longer the platform is used, the more this data accumulates as an asset for the restaurant. By centralizing data, time-consuming manual work—such as reconciling data across locations or matching spreadsheets in Excel—becomes unnecessary, enabling substantial gains in operational efficiency.
With data available in one place, restaurants can make decisions such as:
- Visualizing which days of the week and time slots are the most profitable by combining reservation and sales data, then optimizing staffing and menu composition
- Identifying the types of customers most likely to become repeat visitors by combining customer data and visit frequency, and executing more effective marketing measures
- Analyzing data across all locations to uncover performance differences between stores and design targeted improvement measures
These are just a few examples. As AI technology continues to evolve, the insights that can be generated from integrated data will expand even further. Through this full free offering of its core features, Respo aims to ensure that restaurants of every size can benefit from that evolution.
What Current Restaurant Users Are Saying
“Reservation and sales management across multiple locations can now be viewed on a single screen”
Mr. Yamagishi, Representative of Yamagishi
We operate several restaurants with different concepts and locations, from traditional kaiseki in Kyoto and yakiniku to locations in Tokyo. By implementing Respo’s reservation ledger at our main stores, we were able to centralize reservation management across multiple locations. With site controller integration, reservations from various gourmet websites are automatically imported into the ledger, which has eliminated the need to check each platform separately and helped us avoid double bookings.
We also introduced POS, allowing reservation data and sales data to be connected seamlessly. In the past, each store used a different system, and month-end reporting was a major burden. Now, we can quickly check reservation statuses for each store just by switching between locations, even when we are out of the office, making multi-store management much more efficient.
“Eliminating the ‘second shift’ after business hours and creating an environment where we can focus on hospitality”
Mr. Yamazaki, Owner (Independent restaurant in Tokyo)
As a small counter-style restaurant, what matters most to us is being able to give each guest our full attention. That is why we wanted to keep back-office work to a minimum. In the past, reservation management was time-consuming, and it was not unusual for us to still be tied up with administrative tasks after business hours.
Since adopting Respo’s reservation ledger, we have been able to manage both online and phone reservations from a single screen, greatly reducing the burden of handling bookings. We also use the payment terminal, which has made the checkout process much smoother. For an independent restaurant like ours, having a system that is simple and helps reduce operational hassle has been a tremendous support.
Another major benefit is that we can now serve guests while checking their visit history, something our regular customers have really appreciated.
“Instantly recognizing regular customers and delivering service that no longer relies on memory alone”
Mr. Takimoto, Representative of Manryo
We operate six yakiniku restaurants in the Kansai region and welcome a wide range of guests, many of whom are regular customers. One of our top priorities is improving customer satisfaction, and as part of that effort, we introduced Respo’s CTI integration.
The moment the phone rings, the customer’s name, visit history, and most recent visit date appear on screen across all of our group locations. This allows us to greet them right away with a comment such as, “Thank you for visiting our [store name] branch previously.” We believe that making customers feel remembered leads to a better customer experience, and these small personal touches are what create the greatest value.
“Centralizing reservation management across multiple locations for smoother, error-free operations”
Mr. Kikuchi, Manager of SAVOY Azabu-Juban Main Store
We operate several specialty Neapolitan pizza restaurants in Azabu-Juban. Because our restaurants are centered around counter seating and accommodate a limited number of guests, even a single double booking or missed reservation check can directly affect the customer experience for that day. Since introducing Respo’s reservation ledger across all of our locations, we have been able to check the reservation status of every store in real time on a single screen, which has greatly reduced both the time spent confirming reservations and the risk of oversight. At our main store, we have also introduced a payment terminal, allowing customer information from the reservation ledger to be carried over directly to the payment process, which has shortened the amount of time customers need to wait. When we opened a new store, it was also smooth and easy to start operating under the same system right away.
Future Developments
Respo already offers a customer management function that uses reservation and customer data accumulated in the reservation ledger together with dining data from the POS system.
This makes it possible to understand customers based on their visit history and usage patterns, which can then be used to encourage repeat visits and improve service quality. Going forward, this customer management function will be further enhanced to support more advanced customer segmentation and outreach.
Respo’s goal is to first consolidate restaurant data through a fully free infrastructure, and then help transform restaurant management itself through the use of that data. This is the first step in bringing that value to every restaurant in Japan, from independent operators to large-scale chains.
Comment from Yuki Hariguchi, Representative Director of Hello, Inc.
What Respo aims to achieve is very simple: helping restaurants increase sales while reducing costs. To make that possible, we decided to make all of the essential tools that form the foundation of restaurant operations free of charge. Reservations, POS, payments, and even customer acquisition fees—everything is zero. We want restaurants to use the money they save for better food, better service, and better support for their staff. And we want to make data-driven management the norm, whether for independent restaurants or multi-location operators. Respo aims to become the platform that supports that future.
