- Marketplace commissions run 15–30% of the order. Direct ordering on your own site costs roughly 3% plus a fixed monthly fee. That gap is the entire argument.
- A typical restaurant’s pre-tax profit margin is about 5%. A 30% commission is roughly six times your whole net margin on that order.
- Uber Eats raised its rates on March 11, 2026 — the Lite tier went from 15% to 20%. Most articles you’ll find still quote the old number.
- The honest counter-argument: direct ordering is not meaningfully cheaper for the diner, and the apps bring demand you don’t have. This is about margin on the orders you’d have gotten anyway.
Every restaurant owner knows the commissions are high. Far fewer have sat down and worked out what they cost against actual margin, or where the break-even sits against a flat monthly fee. So here is the arithmetic, with rates verified at each company’s own pricing page in July 2026.
|
15–30%
Company pricing pages, July 2026
|
~5%
pre-tax profit margin for a typical restaurant. A 30% commission is about 6x your entire net margin.
National Restaurant Association, July 2026
|
42%
of operators reported their restaurant was not profitable in 2025.
NRA State of the Restaurant Industry, Feb 2026
|
What the platforms actually charge in 2026
Verified at each company’s published merchant pricing page on July 28, 2026. Rates change — check before you make a decision on them.
DoorDash
| Plan | Delivery commission | Pickup |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | 15% | 6% |
| Plus | 25% | 6% |
| Premier | 30% | 6% |
No monthly fee and no contract. Tablet is $6/week after the trial. The 6% pickup rate requires your DoorDash pickup menu prices to match your in-store prices.
Uber Eats — note the March 2026 increase
| Plan | Marketplace fee | Pickup |
|---|---|---|
| Lite | 20% (was 15% before March 11, 2026) | 7% |
| Plus | 25%, plus 5% more on Uber One member orders | 7% |
| Premium | 30% | 7% |
| Self-delivery | 15% | 7% |
Grubhub
Grubhub is the hardest to pin down, and we would rather say so than invent precision. Their own pages publish three different sets of tier percentages — one blog says marketing starts “as low as 5/10/15%,” another says it starts at “15/20/25%,” and their New York page lists different numbers again.
What is consistent across all their published material:
| ✓ | Marketing/commission is tiered and negotiable, somewhere in the 5–25% range |
| ✓ | Delivery is a further 10% if you use Grubhub’s drivers, 0% if you self-deliver |
| ✓ | Sponsored Listings add roughly 5% on top |
| ✓ | An order processing fee exists — acknowledged in their FAQ, but the percentage is not published anywhere we could find |
A defensible total effective range is roughly 18–38%. If you are on Grubhub, get your actual rate card in writing rather than trusting any published figure, including this one.
What direct ordering costs
| Platform | Published price | Structure |
|---|---|---|
| Owner.com | $249/mo + 5% per order, or $499/mo flat | Month-to-month, no contract |
| ChowNow | From $229/mo + 2.95% + $0.29 processing | Flat monthly, no commission |
| Menufy | $149/mo annual, $179/mo monthly | Explicitly no per-order commission |
| Square Online | $0 / $49 / $149 per location per month | Processing charged separately |
| DoorDash Storefront | $0/mo, 0% commission, 2.9% + $0.30 | Ordering on your own site |
| Toast | Not published — quote only | Sales-led pricing |
On top of the platform you pay card processing. Stripe publishes 2.9% + 30¢ online; Square is 3.3% + 30¢ on its free plan, dropping to 2.9% + 30¢ on paid tiers.
Direct: about 3% of the order plus a fixed monthly fee that does not grow when you do.
That second structure is the whole point. Once you clear the monthly fee, every additional direct order keeps roughly 27 more cents on the dollar.
The break-even math
Take a $499/month flat-fee direct platform against a 30% Premier-tier marketplace commission. Ignore processing for a moment, since you pay something similar either way.
| Monthly delivery volume | 30% marketplace commission | $499 flat direct | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| $1,000 | $300 | $499 | −$199 |
| $1,660 | $498 | $499 | break-even |
| $5,000 | $1,500 | $499 | +$1,001 |
| $10,000 | $3,000 | $499 | +$2,501 |
| $25,000 | $7,500 | $499 | +$7,001 |
| $50,000 | $15,000 | $499 | +$14,501 |
Break-even lands around $1,660 a month in orders. Above that, the flat fee wins and keeps winning. At $25,000/month you are keeping roughly $7,000 that would otherwise have left the business.
Now put that against margin. On a $30 order at a 5% net margin you make $1.50. The 30% commission on that same order is $9.00 — six times your profit. You are not sharing the upside with the platform; the platform is taking a multiple of it.
The honest counter-argument
You will hear the case for direct ordering made much more aggressively than the evidence supports, usually by people selling direct-ordering software. Three things are worth being straight about.
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✓True in direct ordering’s favour
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✗Overstated, or simply not true
|
The realistic strategy is not abandoning the marketplaces. It is making sure that every customer who already knows your name has an obvious, fast way to order direct — so the commission is only paid on genuinely new discovery, not on your regulars.
Pay commission to be discovered. Don’t pay commission to be remembered.
What about the commission caps?
Several cities capped delivery commissions during the pandemic, and a lot of advice online still assumes those caps protect you. Mostly, they no longer do.
| Jurisdiction | Current position |
|---|---|
| New York City | Up to 43% total. Local Law 79 of 2025 replaced the old cap with 15% delivery + 5% basic service + 3% transaction + up to 20% enhanced service. The nominal cap went up. |
| San Francisco | 15% on “core delivery service,” but platforms may charge more for opt-in marketing and enhanced services. Weakened in January 2023. |
| Seattle | 15%, with exceptions permitting more for additional services such as marketing. |
| Portland, OR | 15% delivery / 4% takeout. |
| Denver, Los Angeles, Chicago | Caps were enacted during the pandemic and appear to have lapsed. Verify locally before relying on them. |
How to actually shift orders direct
| 1 | Put ordering on your own site, above the fold, on mobile. Most restaurant sites bury it. If a customer has to scroll or hunt, they will reopen the app. |
| 2 | Insert a card in every third-party delivery bag. A QR code straight to your own ordering page, with a reason to use it — a free side, not a percentage. |
| 3 | Claim and complete your Google Business Profile, and set the order link to your ordering page rather than a marketplace. |
| 4 | Make your own prices match or beat the app. If your direct prices are higher, you have taught customers to use the app. |
| 5 | Run pickup direct, always. Pickup is the easiest volume to move — there is no delivery logistics argument for paying 6–10% on an order the customer collects themselves. |
| 6 | Capture the email or phone number at checkout and actually use it. The customer list is the durable asset here, more than the margin on any single order. |