The Costco Playbook – But for People Who Want to Spend More

01 /The Concept

Getting a table at the world's most sought-after restaurants normally requires months of waiting, inside connections, or both. Dorsia built a business around removing both conditions – legally. The pitch is simple: access to the most in-demand restaurants in the world, the ones where a reservation normally requires either a six-month wait or lightning reflexes when tables drop online.

The club covers cities across the globe. Scroll through the app and you'll find restaurants in New York, Miami, Mexico City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Aspen, London, Courchevel, Ibiza, Mallorca, Monaco, Saint-Tropez, Cannes, and Dubai. New York leads the list by a wide margin – 72 restaurants and counting.

The city has a history with this problem worth noting. Until recently, a shadow market for coveted reservations flourished there: brokers would snap up tables the moment they appeared and flip them on private auction sites, sometimes for thousands of dollars per booking. New York eventually outlawed the practice. That turned out to be good news for Dorsia, which does essentially the same thing – legally.

The mechanics: Dorsia negotiates directly with restaurants to hold a fixed allotment of tables exclusively for members, bookable through the app. Restaurants benefit because each Dorsia booking comes with a guaranteed minimum spend – the threshold varies by venue, but the commitment is real.

Getting in requires downloading the app and submitting a membership application. Endorsements from existing members push applications to the front of the queue. Until late last year access was free; that window has closed. Today the entry-level membership costs $175, and Dorsia warns the price is going up. Above that sit a $5,000 premium tier and a $25,000-per-year premium-plus tier, both offering priority booking over lower tiers – which, realistically, is the main attraction.

Dorsia has just closed its first outside funding: $50.4M led by Index Ventures, the firm behind Dropbox, Figma, Notion, Revolut, Robinhood, Roblox, Plaid, and Slack. That's not a casual check – it's a vote of confidence in the business model. The round valued Dorsia at $146M.

02 /Why It Matters

Dorsia's founder reports that the average spend per booking climbed 40% after the membership fee was introduced. The mechanism is classic consumer psychology: members feel compelled to extract maximum value from the membership cost – so they order more freely, without consciously registering that the meal itself still comes out of their pocket.

Costco has exploited the same dynamic for decades. Only cardholders can shop there, which drives members to visit more often and fill larger carts to justify the annual fee. Costco profits on both the card and the volume – even while deliberately capping its margins to keep prices low.

If Costco is a savings club built on the same psychological lever, Dorsia is its mirror image: a spending club where the whole point is to consume more, not less. But the consumption isn't random – it's status consumption, purchased either to validate one's own sense of position or to signal it to the guests being entertained.

And that logic is spreading. Myria ([related review](/review/paradoksalnaja-strategija-vyzhivanija)) claims that "real success is more than money" and built a marketplace selling "goods, experiences, and services you can't Google" – membership costs $30,000 a year. Long Story Short ([covered here](/review/million-dollarov-v-god-tolko-dlja-nachala)) runs a similar marketplace where access alone costs $1,000 per month. EPTME ([reviewed here](/review/millionerov-bolshe-chem-programmistov-a-servisov-dlja-nih-menshe)), backed by $30M, operates under the banner "Get impossible experiences" – VIP restaurant access, exclusive events, closed-door gatherings; Essentialist takes a similar premium angle with bespoke travel itineraries designed by well-known travel journalists, at $2,600 per year. And Superlogic ([related review](/review/hochesh-imet-lojalnyh-klientov-dari-im-jemocii)), with $21.7M raised, brought the principle to the loyalty-rewards stack: its catalog of "moments money can't buy" includes NBA Finals seats, VIP concert access, backstage Broadway tours, and seats at private chef's dinners.

03 /Opportunities

For most of modern economic history, status was expressed through what you could buy. But once enough people can afford most things, money itself becomes a poor differentiator. The logical response – artificial or real scarcity – is as old as luxury goods, but technology is opening fresh angles on it.

The number of millionaires worldwide has grown significantly faster than the general population since the early 2000s. Billionaires have multiplied even faster. That demographic shift creates a persistent, well-funded demand for services that ordinary wealth alone can't unlock.

Bitcoin, interestingly, fits the same pattern – an asset whose appeal rests partly on its strict supply cap.

The opportunity, then, is in platforms that distribute or create scarcity: access marketplaces, members-only networks, curated experience layers. The audience is unusually solvent, which compresses the usual monetization struggle. The main creative challenge is choosing what kind of scarcity to manufacture – and which story to tell around it.