What delivery apps really charge you: the calculation nobody does for you

The starting point: how the business operated before

The following scenario is representative of a situation many restaurants and food businesses face when they depend on third-party delivery apps. The data reflects real sector averages, confirmed by publicly disclosed commission structures and restaurant owner accounts. Take a neighborhood food business — kitchen-run, 4 to 6 employees — that does most of its delivery sales through DoorDash and, to a lesser extent, UberEats. The owner reviews the gross revenue reported by the app every two weeks but never sits down to calculate how much of that money actually lands in the business account after commissions, payment processing fees, and in some cases the platform's delivery cost. The restaurant has no direct ordering channel: if a regular customer wants to order without the app, the only option is calling the restaurant and placing the order by phone — something that rarely happens because the app is right there on the customer's phone. The invisible cost is larger: the restaurant does not have the contact information of its recurring customers, cannot notify them of a promotion or bring them back if they stop ordering, and is completely dependent on the platform maintaining the same terms month after month.

Why the problem hadn't been solved before

The problem is not resolved because the real commission calculation is rarely done explicitly. The payout the app sends shows the net deposit, not a line-by-line breakdown of how much was deducted and why — so the owner knows that "not much is left" but does not have the exact number to act on. There is also an installed belief: the idea that the app is the only way customers can find them, and that stopping to use it — even partially — means losing orders overnight. Many owners remember a lower promotional rate that some platforms offered at some point and which has since ended. They still believe they are paying that rate when in reality the effective commission is considerably higher.

What was implemented and how

The first step was not signing up for anything — it was getting out a calculator. The owner pulled the last three months of DoorDash and UberEats payouts and built a simple spreadsheet: gross revenue by platform, effective commission deducted, delivery cost when managed by the app, and the real net that ended up in the business account. That exercise — which took less than an afternoon — revealed something intuition could not fully grasp: the average effective commission was running around 28% of total delivery revenue billed, well above the promotional rate the owner remembered from a deal a couple of years earlier. With that number in hand, the question shifted from "how much are they charging me?" to "what share of my orders could I receive directly, without going through the app, without losing the volume I already have?" The restaurant identified that a portion of orders already came from regular customers arriving through Instagram or word of mouth — orders that today were processed through the app anyway, paying the same commission as a brand-new customer acquired by the platform.

The concrete results

What the business learned along the way

Companies that do this exercise frequently discover that the problem is not the commission itself — which exists and has to be paid as long as the app keeps delivering volume — but the complete lack of visibility into the real number. The most repeated recommendation for other owners in the same situation: do the calculation with the real payouts from the last three months before deciding anything, rather than going off the rate the app advertises or what others in the industry say. At Zefell we help with this calculation and evaluate what share of volume can migrate to a direct channel without affecting the orders the apps actually bring in.

Is your business in a similar situation?

This real commission exercise applies to any restaurant billing a meaningful portion of its revenue through DoorDash or UberEats, that has never broken down payout by payout how much is left after commissions, and that has regular customers who currently order through the app simply because they have no other direct way to do it. If you recognize yourself in this situation, at Zefell we can help you see the real commission calculation in your own business and what share of your volume could come in directly without stopping use of the apps that already bring you customers.