Appetas

» see appetas.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The demo was the sales pitch. You typed a restaurant name and a city, picked what it served off a dropdown that ran from African to Wine Bar through about forty cuisines, and Appetas showed you a finished website before you had signed up for anything. It pulled in the menu and the address from what was already public, then connected the parts an American restaurant needed anyway: a table through OpenTable, an order through GrubHub. Fourteen day trial, and a toll free number on every page for owners who would rather talk to somebody.

Curtis Fonger and Keller Smith built it. Both had come out of Microsoft, one from the interface side of SkyDrive and one from managing SharePoint, and the idea won them twenty five thousand dollars at an AngelHack weekend in 2012. They took it through Microsoft's Windows Azure accelerator the next year and raised roughly seventy thousand on top of the prize, from Right Side Capital and TechStars among others. For a company of that size, the product was absurdly finished.

Google bought them on 7 May 2014 and the headline on TechCrunch that day said the rest out loud: it had bought a website builder for restaurants and would be shutting it down. The reading at the time was Yelp. Google wanted small merchants to have a presence it could index and surface, and it wanted the two people who had worked out how to give a restaurant one in under a minute.

~ the case file ~

~ twelve more days ~

The shutdown was announced before it happened, which is normal, but the gap is unusually visible here because the marketing site never flinched. On 19 May 2014, twelve days after Google had publicly said the service was closing, the Internet Archive crawled appetas.com and got the full product page: the cuisine dropdown, the fourteen day trial, the toll free number, a working signup. Somebody could have become a customer that afternoon.

By 28 May the domain was a Google Sites page headed "Appetas is Joining Google!" with [email protected] at the bottom and nothing else to do. That page is still there in 2026, more than a decade of a dead company joining Google in the present tense.

~ what a restaurant here did instead ~

Everything Appetas plugged into was American. OpenTable held the table and GrubHub carried the order, and neither of them existed where I live. In Turkey that whole layer belonged to Yemeksepeti, which had been running since the early 2000s and had already trained both sides to skip the restaurant's own website entirely. A place in Ankara did not need a site generated in eight seconds, because its internet presence was a listing on somebody else's platform with a photo of the menu on it.

Which is roughly where the whole category ended up anyway, in both countries. The independent restaurant website lost to the aggregator, and Google buying the best builder of them in order to turn it off was a reasonable description of the market.

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