When some customers walk into Fix Coffee + Bikes in The Well, they merely scan a QR code, order and leave the downtown café — coffee or tea in hand.
No credit cards are tapped. No cash is exchanged. There’s no payment at all, because the customer has a drink subscription to the café.
While subscription-style business is still relatively new to Toronto restaurants and cafés, it has the potential to bring big changes to the way Fix Coffee + Bikes does business, according to café owner Fred Sztabinski.
“It’s the customer committing to spending their dollars with you,” says Sztabinski.
In the past few months, just over a dozen Toronto restaurants and cafés, including Fix Coffee + Bikes, have launched subscriptions using the Love Maple platform created by software engineers Nelson Lee and Harry Brown, which allows patrons to prepay for discounted food and drinks.
In return, independent local businesses signed up with the platform get a steady flow of upfront revenue.
Lee and Brown launched the platform last November. Now, some 300 people have subscriptions across 13 eateries.
Lee says a subscription model can level the playing field for small businesses being left behind the tap-and-go loyalty card tech of giants like Starbucks and Tim Hortons.
“If you’re a barista at Starbucks, you’re just focused on making good coffee and someone else is focused on bringing people in,” he says. “For small businesses, they don’t have that.”
The subscriptions are “win-win,” Lee says, guaranteeing income for small businesses, and discounts and convenience for customers.
Customers can subscribe to one business on an individual pass, or a collection of businesses on a neighbourhood pass.
Some of the subscriptions offered include: five coffees a week for $14.99, 10 “sweet treats” a month for $39.99 and a 365-beer subscription for $1,725 a year.
Generally, customers save about 10 to 20 per cent in the long run by purchasing a subscription, Lee says.
Businesses get to decide what they offer on the platform and for how much, and Love Maple takes a five-per-cent cut of the subscriptions it manages.
“Many of the customers are still subscribed to the same places that they joined in November, which is super cool,” Lee says. “It’s really exciting to see.”
Modern-day subscriptions took off as a business model in 2012, according to Adam Levinter, founder of Toronto-based Scriberbase, which provides subscription advice to entrepreneurs.
Levinter says the global subscription economy — including digital newspapers and entertainment streamers like Netflix and Spotify — is worth about $550 billion (U.S.) a year, and is expected to grow to more than $1 trillion by 2028.
Increasingly, small businesses are using the model as well, says Shreyas Sekar, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough and U of T’s Rotman School of Management.
Subscriptions allow businesses to lock in customers and cash flow, he says, and with the food industry’s razor-thin margins, he can see the attraction.
“The idea of things being predictable is such a big deal for restaurants,” he says, “that I totally see the benefits of getting people to commit up front.”
The trick, he adds, is retaining customers.
“The challenge is always avoiding the churn,” Sekar says, “which is that people subscribe and then people are just going to drop out.”
Other challenges include the high cost of living and overall subscription fatigue.
Levinter says it’s too early to say if the eatery subscription trend will catch on, but trying something new “may be a unique angle,” to bring in customers.
“The subscription economy is growing,” he said. “It’s not going anywhere.”
For café owner Sztabinski, he hopes the model continues to take off.
Two months in, the café’s handful of subscribed customers already make up about 10 to 15 per cent of daily sales.
“If it grows and it becomes a more substantial part of our daily or monthly sales,” says Sztabinski, ”then yes, it’s helpful for forecasting, it’s helpful for cash-flow tracking and just knowing where we stand financially.”
As for Love Maple, Lee is confident eatery subscriptions will catch on.
He and co-founder Brown are looking to open subscriptions for eateries in The Path, and expand Love Maple’s offerings in the Financial District and across the city.
“Imagine how enticing it’d be if you could go to any café in Toronto,” he says, “and it comes at a better price than if you were to go regularly.”
Correction – Feb. 12, 2026
This article was updated from a previous version to note that modern day subscription business model boom took off in 2012, but subscription models have been around for a long time.
