The economic butterfly effect: where your 10 dinars go

Look how many riders live off them

I was sitting with friends at a café when a food-delivery bike went past, and one of them said what everyone says: “Look at that — they have employed people. Look how many riders live off these apps.” A second friend added the other half of the standard argument: “And the offers! Cashback, coupons — I have a coupon right now, let's order.”

I asked the question that makes me unpopular at cafés. Who paid for that coupon? And where does the rider's salary come from?

“The company, obviously. Marketing budgets.”

The company is not a charity. It takes a commission from the restaurant. The restaurant puts that commission into the price you pay. The real loser is the restaurant, and sometimes it is you. I said, and I still mean it, that I am not against the app. The service is excellent. It feeds you today. But if you follow the money for long enough, it may be starving your children tomorrow.

My friends pushed back, and their points were fair: the apps boost the economy, restaurants get several times the orders they used to, riders have work, and the food arrives at the door. All true. So I asked them to look at the bigger picture with me for a minute before we ordered.

A whole family, each one sitting on a sector

Here is the picture. Sister Delivery-App takes a cut of the entire restaurant sector. Brother Ride-Hailing takes a cut of the entire transport sector. Brother Card-Network takes a cut of every purchase in every shop. Brother Games-Console takes the entertainment budget of every teenager. And the newest arrival, Brother AI, is quietly taking a cut of business itself — every proposal, every design, every line of code.

It is a whole family. Each member sits on one sector, and with every transaction it flies a coin abroad. Not a big coin. A few per cent here, a subscription there, a small fee on the fee. Nobody feels it, which is exactly the point.

Take the ten dinars you spent on lunch. After a few laps around the system — the app's commission, the card network's fee, the cloud bill the app pays, the console subscription you paid for last night — a surprising share of those ten dinars has ended up in the pockets of companies that have never employed anyone in your city. Money that could have circulated here, opened a project, hired a person, has instead evaporated slowly and painlessly.

And what does an economy get when its money evaporates slowly? Inflation on one side and poverty on the other, with nobody able to point to the moment it happened.

Why I call it the economic butterfly effect

I call this the economic butterfly effect. A small flap of wings in every single transaction — so small that it would be absurd to complain about any one of them — and a storm across the entire economy a few years later. No single app caused it. No single commission is unreasonable. The storm is made of things that are, individually, completely fine.

The reason it matters for a technology company is that we are the family. Not the delivery app specifically, but the category: software platforms that sit between a buyer and a seller and take a percentage. The question for anyone who builds technology in this region is simply which direction the coin flies when the transaction happens on your platform.

At this point in the café, my friend said “Enough butterflies — we are hungry,” opened the app, and ordered shawarma with extra fries. And that is how my economic philosophy ended, for that afternoon at least.

I am telling the story with the ending intact because it is the honest ending. I did not convince anyone. I ate the shawarma too. But I have thought about the butterflies every day since, and they are part of why Nplay is shaped the way it is.

What I am not saying

Because this is the internet, let me be precise about what I am not saying. I am not saying delete the apps. They solved a real problem, they made small restaurants visible, and a rider with a job is better than a young man without one. I use them. My friends use them, sometimes mid-argument.

I am also not saying that foreign platforms are villains. They built something people wanted, and the fact that a Jordanian restaurant can now be found by a tourist in thirty seconds is a good thing. The card network that takes its cut also makes it safe for me to pay a stranger.

What I am saying is that we should stop counting only the visible jobs — the riders — and start counting the invisible outflow as well. A sector that hands three or four per cent of every sale abroad, forever, is paying a permanent tax that never shows up in a budget line. The healthy question is not “should this platform exist?” but “what are we building here that people elsewhere will pay for, so that the coins fly in both directions?”

That is a question for governments and universities, of course. But it is also a question for every small technology company, including mine, because we are the ones who get to decide where the next platform is built.

Why Nplay builds its own products in Amman

Nplay could have been a reseller. It is the easier business: import a hologram cabinet, licence a foreign signage platform, mark it up, install it, and send a percentage of every subscription abroad every month for as long as the client stays. Many companies in our region work exactly this way and there is nothing dishonourable about it.

We chose the other path, and the café argument is a fair summary of why. Nplay Beam, our cloud digital signage platform, is developed by our own team. When a national hypermarket chain runs it across 32 branches, or a clinic hub in Amman uses it to keep its patients informed, the subscription pays developers here, and the product improves because of what those clients ask for. The Halo Box combines hardware with our own operating software, AI avatar and content platform, so the value that sits inside the cabinet stays with the team that built it. Nplay Slate, our reusable e-paper badge system, is designed here from the start rather than licensed in.

We hire locally for the same reason — 3D artists, developers, technicians, project engineers — and we sell outward, into Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf, so that for once the coin flies in the other direction. It is a small flap of wings. But the whole point of the butterfly effect is that small flaps add up.

You can read more about how we think about this on our about page, or look at what we have built so far.

A question for the next café

I will leave you with the question I now ask myself before signing up for anything: when this transaction happens, which direction does the coin fly? Sometimes the answer is “abroad, and that is fine, because nothing local does this yet.” Sometimes the answer is “abroad, and a company two streets away does exactly this.” The second answer is the one worth pausing over.

Then order the shawarma. Extra fries. The economy can wait until after lunch.