Terms of service

Version 2.9 · in effect from 28 August 2026 · replaces version 2.8 of 26 August 2026

These are the terms you agree to when you use UnivMenu — as a restaurant owner, as someone who sends us a menu photograph, or as a guest reading a menu at a table. Each section says the rule in plain words first; where there is more to it, the full clause sits in the panel underneath.

The service

UnivMenu turns a restaurant's menu into a multilingual site, rented month by month. UnivMenu is a QuikForge product: QuikForge, a Hong Kong company, is the seller of record. You buy directly from us — nobody resells UnivMenu and nobody sells it on our behalf.

What UnivMenu is, and what it is not

• We are a hosting utility and a translation pipeline. We do not cook, sell, serve or deliver food or drink, and we take no part in what happens at the table.
• We do not own, run, endorse or have any commercial affiliation with the restaurants whose menus appear on UnivMenu. A restaurant that has claimed its menu and pays a subscription is our customer — that is the whole of the relationship.
• A menu nobody has claimed yet was built by us from a photograph of a paper menu sent in by a member of the public. It carries a link the venue can use to claim it — or to ask us to remove it.

Menu content, and who answers for it

• Menu content — dishes, prices, marks — is provided by each restaurant and is the owner's responsibility.
• Until a menu is claimed, what it shows is a transcription of a photograph. It may be out of date, incomplete or wrong. The prices at the till are the venue's prices, not ours.
• Claiming a menu means taking full responsibility for what it says: the dishes, the prices, and the allergen and dietary information.
• A UnivMenu page is a transcription utility, not a food-safety document. Ingredients are not verified by us; confirm allergy-critical information with staff, at the table, before ordering.
• UnivMenu and QuikForge are not liable for menu content or prices.

The prices you show, and the price at the till

• Every price shown on a UnivMenu page is the venue's own. The venue sets it, reviews it when the menu is set up, and can change it at any time from the owner portal.
• Some prices are decided at the moment of the order — seafood by weight, a market price — and are keyed in by the venue's own staff. Those are the venue's prices too.
• Before a price reaches a guest or the till, a member of the venue's staff confirms it. The staff order view and the till show that confirmed price; they do not calculate one.
• UnivMenu displays what the venue sets. We do not set a price, we do not verify one, and we do not settle a bill: the commercial transaction is between the venue and the guest, and it is recorded by the venue's own system.
• If a price shown is wrong, the venue answers for it — the same rule as the rest of the menu content.

How a menu is read, and how it is translated

• A menu photograph is read by machine. When a photograph reaches us, an automated vision model reads the text printed on it and finds the part of the picture that shows each dish. Where a dish is not already in our dictionary, an automated language model translates it.
• That reading happens outside the country you are in. The photograph and the menu text are sent to OpenRouter, the service that routes a request to the provider running the model, and the result comes back to us. Nothing else goes with them: no account details, no payout details, no record of a consent, no guest's order and nothing a guest taps while reading a menu. Those never reach a model at all.
• We use it to build your menu and for nothing else. The photograph and its text are not used to train a model, ours or anybody else's.
• The translations on a UnivMenu page are ours, made by machine and by dictionary. They are a convenience for reading, and they can be wrong.
• Every order line resolves back to the dish name in the kitchen's own language, so the kitchen never sees a translation. That is how a mistranslation cannot become the wrong plate.
• Where a translation and that name disagree, the name in the kitchen's own language is the one that counts. Which language that is depends on the market, and the country supplement for your market says which.

Who owns the translated menu

• Your menu stays yours. The dish names, descriptions and prices you gave us are yours and stay yours. We take no ownership of them.
• The photograph stays yours too, and you license it to us. You keep the copyright. By sending it you give us — and the providers who work on it for us — an irrevocable, royalty-free right to use it for one thing only: creating and running digital menus.
• The menu content is licensed only by somebody who can license it. If you run the restaurant, or you are authorised to act for it, you license us the dish names, descriptions and prices as well, to publish as part of the digital menu. If you are not, what you are giving us is the photograph, and that is all you are representing you can give.
• The UnivMenu edition of it is ours. The translations, the structured menu, the dietary marks, the cut-out dish pictures and the layout are made by us, at our cost, and we own them.
• While you subscribe, you may use and show that edition for your own restaurant. That permission ends when the subscription does — and your own original menu is untouched by that, because it was always yours.

Photographs, and the licence you give us

• What you are promising when you send a photograph. Three things, and they are the three lines you ticked at the camera: that it is a proper photograph of a menu, that it is yours to give, and that having given us the right to build a menu from it you are not coming back later with a claim about it.
• When you send us a photograph of a menu, or upload photographs to a menu you have claimed, you give us permission to store it, crop it, translate what it says and display the result, for the purpose of running that menu.
• That permission covers the dish pictures we cut out of a menu photograph and show beside a dish. Those crops are part of the menu we host, and nothing more.
• We use these photographs to run the service. We do not sell them and we do not license them on to anyone else.
• We take menus down. On a request from the venue's owner that we can verify, the menu comes off, and a venue that tells us it does not want to be listed is not built again.
• If somebody tells us a photograph you sent infringes their rights, you agree that we may forward their notice to you, including their own contact details, so that you can answer it. That is how the complaint reaches the person who can actually resolve it.
• Send us infringing material more than once and we stop accepting from you. We close the account and we do not build from further submissions.
• What a restaurant pays us follows the size of its menu, and nothing else. We take no payment attributable to any particular photograph or any particular dish.

If you send us a photo

• You are making a good-faith community contribution: a photograph of a menu on display, sent for the convenience of the people who will read it.
• You do not publish anything. You send us a photograph; we build the site, and whether a menu goes up, stays up or comes down is for us and for the venue, not for you.
• You must not use UnivMenu to impersonate restaurant staff, to compete unfairly with a venue, or to commit any kind of fraud.
• If somebody brings a claim against us because of what you sent us, you cover us for it.

If you claim a menu

• You confirm that you are the owner of the venue or are authorised to act for it.
• From the moment you claim it, the menu is yours: the dishes, the prices, the allergen and dietary information, and keeping all of it current.
• The tools to correct a menu are in the owner portal, and a correction you make is yours, not ours.

Alcohol and other regulated items

A menu page lists what a venue sells and at what price, exactly as the paper menu on the table does. Where that list includes an alcoholic drink, the listing is a factual statement of what the venue offers — it is not advertising, promotion, sponsorship or a sales offer by us. We do not sell alcohol, we run no alcohol promotion of any kind, and age and service rules are for the venue to apply at the table. The same is true of tobacco and of any other item whose sale is regulated where the venue trades.

The staff order view

• A guest builds an order on their own phone and shows it to a waiter. The order travels in the code the waiter scans; it does not pass through our servers, and it is not connected to the venue's till or POS system.
• Staff enter the items into the venue's own system. The staff view is there to be read, not to take payment.
• Invitations to the staff view lapse automatically after a short time, and a lapsed invitation has to be issued again from the owner portal.
• We are not liable for an order that is lost, mis-read or mis-keyed, nor for any billing difference or internal staff matter that follows from it.

Subscription and prices

• Plans and add-ons are billed monthly and renew until you cancel.
• The currency and any consumption tax are your market's. The price list for your market shows the currency, and your country supplement says whether a consumption tax is added to the published figure and what appears on your invoice.
• The daily figures on the pricing page are the monthly price made easy to judge — billing itself is monthly.
• Your plan follows the size of your menu: we count the dishes and show you the tier before anything is owed.
• The prices you see already include any finder reward — nothing extra and nothing hidden is charged because someone found you.
• If an invoice is not paid, the published menu is replaced by a holding page on the due date — there is no grace period. The web address and the printed QR code do not change, and the menu comes back the moment the payment does.
• You can cancel at any time from the owner portal; it takes effect at the end of the billing period you are in. Refunds and add-on changes are in the refund policy.

The free period

• Every new menu has a free period of 14 days, counted from the day the subscription starts, unless the price list for your market publishes a longer one.
• Vietnam is in a pre-commercial beta until 30 September 2026 and nothing is payable there before that date. Start before it and your menu is free until it; if your own free days run past it, they finish. Whichever of the two falls later is the day the menu becomes payable.
• Every add-on is unlocked for the whole free period, whichever length applies to you.
• When the free period ends you keep and pay for the add-ons you want; the menu carries on without the ones you drop.
• If you choose no plan at all, the menu pauses and your data is kept, so you can start it again later.
• Kitchen Queue is free for its first two billed cycles for a venue that signs up before the date published for its own market. It has not been released yet; the two free cycles run from its release, not from your signup.

Finder rewards

• Anyone can photograph a menu and create a mockup. Saving it to a profile holds that restaurant for the person who made it — one finder per restaurant, single level, no multi-level referrals.
• The reward is registered when the owner scans the finder's code. A menu that was never shown to an owner cannot be claimed afterwards, by the finder or by anyone else.
• The reward is 40% of what the restaurant pays for the first six payments they make, then 20% for as long as they keep paying. It is worked out on the price before tax, and add-ons count.
• The six higher-rate payments are counted per restaurant and are used only once. If a restaurant stops paying and later starts again — brought back by you or by anyone else — the rate is 20%.
• The owner has 24 hours to accept a transferred mockup (extendable ×2 to 72h); if they don't register within 7 days the restaurant is released and anyone can find it again.
• A reward is paid while the restaurant is paying. If they stop, the reward stops with them.
• We set the reward rate and may change it. A change takes effect when we publish it here and applies to handshakes made after that. A handshake already made is paid at the rate in force when the handshake happened, whether or not the money has reached you yet, and rewards already paid to you are never reclaimed. We intend to stay generous — this right exists so the service survives if our costs or our risks change.

What a finder is, and what a finder is not

• Finding is something you choose to do, for yourself, whenever you feel like it. It is not a job, and we are not offering one.
• We do not tell you which menus to photograph, when, where, or how many. There is no schedule, no target, no minimum and no maximum, and nobody supervises you.
• You use your own phone and your own time. We give you no equipment, no uniform, no training and no workplace, and we reimburse no expenses.
• You can stop whenever you like, without telling us, and you are free to do the same thing for anyone else — including a competitor of ours.
• Anything we publish about how to find a restaurant — an article, a tip, a suggested routine — is an idea you are free to ignore. It is not an instruction, we do not check whether you followed it, and nothing follows from ignoring it.
• What you spend is yours: the coffee, the meal, the ride to the venue and anything else. None of it can be claimed from us.
• You do not sell for us. You set no price, you negotiate nothing, you sign nothing on our behalf, and you never take money from a restaurant or from anyone else for us.
• You cannot promise a restaurant anything on our behalf. What the service does is what these terms and our published pages say it does; a promise you make beyond that is your own, and the restaurant cannot hold us to it.
• Nothing here makes you an employee, a worker, staff, a contractor, an agent or a partner of QuikForge, in any country in which we operate.
• So nothing that employment brings is owed between us, in either direction: no wage, no leave, no notice, no severance, no insurance and no social contributions.
• The same goes for anyone a venue invites into the owner portal or the staff order view. They are that venue's own people, not ours.

Who can earn, and where

• To claim a restaurant and to earn a reward, the handshake — the moment the owner scans your code — must happen while you are physically in the country the restaurant is in and that we operate in. The countries we operate in are listed on our site, and it is that list, as it stands at the moment of the handshake, that applies.
• A handshake made from outside that country is forfeited. No reward is due for it, and it cannot be put right afterwards.
• We offer this service to people in the countries we operate in. We do not market it to, and do not offer it to, people outside them — including in the European Union.
• You must be 18 or over to find, to claim a restaurant or to be paid a reward. It is the same age in every country we operate in. If you are under 18, no reward is due and we close the account.

Where you are, and what you tell us

• When you make an account you confirm that you are physically in a country we operate in. Those countries are listed on our site, and it is that list, as it stands at the moment you confirm it, that applies.
• You warrant that the confirmation is true, and that you are not using a VPN, a proxy or any other means to appear to be somewhere you are not.
• If it is untrue, any reward is void — pending, approved but unpaid, or already attributed — and we may suspend or close the account. We may do both.
• When you register we record which of our countries our own records place the connection in, and whether it came from a datacentre or VPN range. We record those two things and not your network address. It is what lets a confirmation be checked.
• None of this extends the service to a country we do not operate in.

Before we can pay you

• We need payout details in your own name: the account holder's name, the bank and its country, the account number and the SWIFT/BIC. Where the tax rules that apply to the payment require it, we also need a tax identifier, and where the law of the market a payment is made from requires us to hold further identifying detail before we can pay, we ask you for it at the time. We cannot pay without them, and nothing is owed to you until we have them.
• You do not invoice us. Rewards to a private person are paid without asking that person for an invoice.
• Rewards are paid net of bank charges: whatever it costs to get the money to your bank is deducted from the amount due to you.
• Depending on your tax residency and the rules that apply to you, we have to withhold part of the amount and pay it directly to the tax authorities — which is why we ask for your tax details. In Vietnam, a payment of 5,000,000 VND or more is subject to 10% withholding tax, which we deduct and declare. Below that threshold nothing is withheld. We account for the payments we make in our own filings as the law of the market requires, and what you must declare in your own return is yours. Whether you can reclaim anything withheld is between you and your tax authority: check with them, or with a tax adviser. We do not advise on that.
• A reward tracks what the restaurant actually pays. If they drop an add-on the reward falls with it, and if they do not renew, what is still pending is void.

If we cannot pay you

• We will do everything we reasonably can to reach you.
• An amount we cannot pay is held for three months from the date it falls due. After that it is forfeited.
• Once an amount is forfeited, your name is removed from the attribution against that restaurant.
• No refund and no amount is due to anyone who has not given us payout details.

Your account, and how long we keep it

• Three months quiet — the payment credentials go. Ninety days after an account goes quiet, we destroy the payout details held for it: the bank account number, the tax code, and the rest of what we only ever needed in order to pay somebody. Destroyed, not hidden.
• Six months quiet — the account goes. A hundred and eighty days after an account goes quiet, we erase the account itself: the email address, the password, the name, the contact handles, the sign-in identities and the sessions. After that it cannot be signed into, and it holds nothing that identifies a person.
• Both clocks run on their own. A scheduled job carries them out. Nothing has to be asked for, and nothing waits on us remembering.
• What survives, and only this. The accounting record the law of the market obliges us to keep — the payments made, the tax withheld, and the minimum identifying detail a tax declaration needs. It is kept for the period that law sets, which is ten years for an accounting document under Vietnam's Accounting Law 2015 and at least seven under Hong Kong's Inland Revenue Ordinance; where both reach the same record we keep it for the longer period and destroy it when the last of them ends. Payment records are append-only: never deleted, never edited.
• One deliberate delay. Where an account has money movements in a tax year whose annual finalisation has not yet passed, erasing the identity waits until that finalisation date — 31 March of the year after — so the full year can still be declared. That is why an erasure can fall later than six months, and it is the only reason it does.
• Doing it now. There is a button. Signed in, you can destroy your payout details, and you can erase your account, without writing to anybody. Writing to hello@univmenu.com does the same thing if you would rather.
• We only keep what we need, and for as long as we need it.

Liability, and what you cover

• The service is provided as it is. We do not promise it will be uninterrupted, and we do not promise a menu is accurate — the venue answers for that.
• If a claim reaches us because of something you sent us, published, or took responsibility for, you cover us.
• Our own liability is capped at the subscription fees the owner paid in the three months before the claim.
• Nothing here removes a liability that the law does not allow us to remove.

Where the service runs, and what you consent to

• One machine holds your data. The portal — every account, every payout detail, every consent, every audit record — runs on a virtual private server we rent from Hostinger International Ltd., physically located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. QUIKFORGE LIMITED, in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, is the controller of that data; Hostinger is the processor that hosts it, on our instructions and for no purpose of its own.
• Published menus are somewhere else, and hold no personal data. They are static pages served from Hostinger shared hosting in the United Kingdom, cached on Hostinger's delivery network.
• Registering means consenting to that transfer, and you give the consent yourself. Whether you are a restaurant owner or a finder, the box on the registration form is empty when the page loads. We never tick it for you. A registration sent without it is refused: no account is created and nothing about you is kept.
• It is a condition, not a preference. If you are not willing for your data to be held in Malaysia and read from Hong Kong, we cannot open an account for you.
• What we then do with it, how long we hold it and how you get it back or get rid of it are in the privacy policy, which forms part of these terms.

Which law applies

• By default these terms are governed by the law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, where QuikForge is incorporated.
• Where we publish a country supplement for your market, that supplement prevails over this page for everything it covers. Read yours here: Vietnam supplement → · Hong Kong supplement →.
• If something goes wrong, write to us first: we would rather settle it between us than anywhere else.

Why these languages

We publish in the languages of the people who live in and travel through Southeast Asia, and in the languages most widely spoken. That is the whole of the rule, and the set grows when one of those two reasons says it should.

Privacy → · Cookies → · Refunds → · Vietnam supplement → · Hong Kong supplement →