Why we started here

One high street. Then the next one on the list.

Regulars isn't a national rollout with Chichester as stop one — it's the other way round. Our founder lives in Chichester, so that's the high street we built this for first: the café that remembers your order, the bookshop owner who'll order in the title you asked about last month. We wanted to prove this works somewhere we could feel it working, not just read it in a dashboard.

Why now

There's also a policy window. Government business rates reform is bringing in permanently lower multipliers for retail, hospitality, and leisure premises, paid for by a higher rate on the most valuable properties — aimed at stopping the high street being taxed out of existence. Councils also have new “high street rental auction” powers, introduced under the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act, to force persistently empty shops back into use instead of sitting vacant for years.

Both are aimed at supply — making it cheaper and more possible to run a shop on a high street. Neither puts a single extra customer through the door. That's the gap we think is left once the reforms do their job: someone still has to give people a reason to choose the shop on their street over the app on their phone. That's what Regulars is for.

Why Chichester first

Every town on our waiting list is real interest, not a guess — you can see it on the map on the homepage. But you can only start in one place, and it made sense to start where our founder can walk into every shop on the list in an afternoon and fix a problem in person, not over a support ticket. Once it's working here — properly, for the shopkeepers as much as the shoppers — we'll take the same playbook to whichever town asks for it loudest next.

500 passes, to start

We're deliberately starting small: the first 500 passes in each town, so we can get this right before it's everywhere. If your town isn't live yet, join the waitlist and refer friends — it's the only way to move up it.