Delivery platforms take between 25 and 35 percent of every order. That is the single biggest cost most independent restaurants have that they did not choose.
The short answer
Your own ordering app costs from £2,999 and removes platform commission from every order that moves onto it. On a restaurant doing 400 platform orders a month at £22 average, a 27% commission is roughly £2,376 a month. The arithmetic is usually the whole argument.
Do the sum before you do anything else
| Through a platform | Through your own app | |
|---|---|---|
| Commission per order | 25% to 35% | 0% |
| Payment processing | Included in commission | Roughly 1.5% to 3% |
| Customer data | Theirs | Yours |
| Ability to market to that customer | None | Push notifications, direct |
| Cost on 400 orders at £22 | About £2,376 a month at 27% | About £145 a month in card fees |
What actually goes wrong in restaurants
Phone orders tie up staff during service. Someone is taking an order on the phone while the queue at the counter grows.
You have no customer list. The platforms keep it. Three years of trading and you cannot email the people who order from you every week.
Table bookings live in a notebook. Which means no-shows, double bookings, and no way to remind anyone.
Menu changes mean reprinting. And a delay before the change reaches the platforms.
Loyalty is a paper card. Which nobody carries and which tells you nothing.
What we build for restaurants
- Your own ordering appCollection, delivery, or table ordering, on iOS and Android, with card payment.
- Table booking with remindersThe single cheapest way to cut no-shows.
- Menu management you controlChange a price or mark something off, from your phone, immediately.
- Push notifications to your regularsThe thing the platforms will never give you.
- Digital loyaltyThat actually tells you who your best customers are.
The constraints that matter here
Your customers are not tech people, and neither are your staff. Anything that needs training during service will not be used. This is a design constraint, not a nice-to-have.
Kitchen printing and EPOS. Modern tills with an API integrate cleanly. Older ones frequently have no API, and the honest answer is that orders land on a tablet by the pass instead. That works, and pretending otherwise leads to a bad launch.
Peak times are unforgiving. Software that is fine at 3pm and fails at 7:30pm on a Friday is not fine.
You will not run a marketing campaign. So the app has to acquire users passively: a QR code on the table, on the receipt, on the bag.
Common questions
Will my customers actually download an app?
Your regulars will. First-time customers mostly will not, and you should not build the app expecting them to. The app is for the people who already order from you repeatedly, and that is where the commission saving is.
How quickly does an ordering app pay for itself?
Take your monthly platform orders, multiply by average order value, then by your commission rate. That is the monthly saving on any order you move across. Most independents find the payback period is months rather than years.
Does it work with my till?
Sometimes. Modern EPOS systems with an API integrate cleanly. Older ones often have no API at all, and the honest answer there is that orders arrive on a tablet rather than into the till.
Do I have to handle my own delivery?
No. Plenty of restaurants use their own app for collection and table orders only, and keep the platforms for delivery. That still removes commission from a meaningful share of orders.