For restaurant owners: this is online ordering software, not a restaurant directory.
Published May 2026 · Updated October 4, 2026
Commission-free online ordering means the restaurant pays zero commission on direct orders — the diner pays a small per-order fee at checkout instead. Six vendors legitimately offer it in 2026: Zay-OS ($399-$599/mo flat, operator-first, Florida focus), Owner.com ($499/mo flat), Chowly (enterprise, hidden pricing), ChowNow (from $249/mo, direct-only), Slice (pizza-only), and Toast Online Ordering (bundled with Toast POS). Pick based on whether you need the operator stack or just a direct-only site.
Sources for the prices and rates in this section: Owner.com pricing; ChowNow pricing, read 4 Oct 2026. A company can change them; its own page is what counts.
The restaurant keeps 100% of food revenue from every order placed on its branded direct-ordering site. No 25-35% take. No per-order skim. The diner pays a small per-order fee at checkout (on Zayos, a flat $0.99 on pickup and delivery) which funds the platform.
Card processing still costs ~2.9% + $0.30 on Stripe online. The diner-paid per-order fee is the platform\'s revenue. Sales-tax filing is the restaurant\'s responsibility. Commission-free applies to the marketplace-style 25-35% take being eliminated, not to all transaction-side costs.
Every vendor here genuinely ships commission-free direct ordering. The differences are price model, contract terms, what is bundled (marketplaces, dispatch, sales tax), and who they are built for.
Independents and 1-25 location regional brands, especially in Florida. Operations-first stack: branded site + Otter marketplace ingestion onto one kitchen tablet + CRM + sales-tax reports + Florida SEO + GEO bundled in the flat fee.
Florida-tuned by design; works nationally but the GEO + Google Business depth is strongest in FL.
Independents who want the same flat-fee category as Zay-OS with national geography focus. Strong on direct-ordering site, weaker on marketplace ingestion.
The Flexible plan charges the restaurant 5% of every order, so only the $499 Flat Rate plan carries no restaurant fee. Guests pay a 5% order support fee on both plans.
Restaurants needing deep POS middleware coverage — 50+ POS, including long-tail enterprise systems. POS-sync-first, not direct-ordering-first.
No published pricing. Pitched as "AI agent for 17,000+ locations" — enterprise positioning, not built for indies.
Smaller independents with lower order volume who want a no-frills commission-free direct ordering site at a lower sticker price.
Limited marketplace ingestion. CRM and reorder messaging are shallower than the operator-OS vendors. Card payments carry 2.95% + $0.29 per transaction on top of the plan.
Pizzerias specifically — Slice is vertical-focused on pizza and runs both a marketplace and a direct-ordering tier.
Both memberships carry a flat fee on each order, so the cost still rises with order count. The $399 membership also lists a $1,000 implementation fee. Pizza-only.
Restaurants already on Toast POS hardware. Native integration depth — Toast Online Ordering is the cleanest add-on for existing Toast operators.
Requires Toast POS. Toast lists its Starter Kit from $0 a month and its Point of Sale plan from $69 a month, with online ordering sold as an add-on and no price shown for it. Marketplace ingestion is shallow vs Otter-based platforms.
Sources for the prices and rates in this section: Owner.com pricing; ChowNow pricing; Slice pricing; Toast pricing, read 4 Oct 2026. A company can change them; its own page is what counts.
Most commission-free direct-ordering platforms (Owner, ChowNow, BentoBox, Popmenu) stop at direct ordering. Your Uber Eats / DoorDash / Grubhub orders still land on separate marketplace tablets. The only commission-free platforms that solve this are the ones built on Otter (Zay-OS, parts of Chowly's enterprise tier).
When the kitchen 86s an item, the change has to propagate across direct ordering + every marketplace + the POS. A 3-5 minute lag is normal; longer lags cause sold-out items to stay orderable and force refunds. Ask any vendor specifically: "What is the typical sync latency on a menu change across direct + marketplaces + POS?"
Most commission-free vendors give the restaurant full customer ownership. A handful do not — they treat the customer record as platform property and limit export. Read the contract specifically. Zay-OS, Owner, ChowNow, Toast Online Ordering all give full export; double-check the rest before signing.
Commission-free does not mean zero fees in the world. On most commission-free platforms the diner pays a small service fee at checkout to cover the platform. On Zayos it is a flat $0.99 on pickup and delivery, and 10% on catering. What changes is who keeps the food revenue: you, not the marketplace.
On marketplace orders, the marketplace usually handles sales tax. On direct orders, that responsibility shifts to the restaurant. Zay-OS calculates the tax per location and gives you sales-tax reports with CSV exports for filing; filing and paying it stays with the restaurant.
Pull 90 days of DoorDash + Uber Eats + Grubhub statements. Sum the commission line. Multiply by 4 for annual. That is the budget you are reallocating. Anything under ~$6k/yr in marketplace commission probably does not justify a $499/mo platform fee in year one.
Operator-first (Zay-OS) prioritizes kitchen tablet aggregation, marketplace ingestion, POS depth, sales-tax reports. Marketing-first (Popmenu) prioritizes email/SMS automation depth and interactive menus. Website-first (BentoBox) prioritizes a beautiful CMS-driven marketing site. Pick the one whose depth matches your top operational pain.
If a vendor will not put a number on the website, the floor is almost always higher than the floor of vendors who will. Zay-OS, Owner, ChowNow and Slice publish prices. Toast shows no price for its online ordering add-on, and Chowly and Olo show none at all. Treat that as a signal.
Ask: "Will Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Grubhub orders land on the same kitchen tablet as my direct orders?" If the answer is no, you are buying a direct-ordering tool, not an operator OS. The tablet-hell problem stays unsolved.
Annual contracts are red flags for any modern SaaS, especially restaurant SaaS where pricing changes quickly. Confirm cancellation terms and customer-data export in writing before signing. Zay-OS is month-to-month with full CSV export on every plan — most peers say they are, the contract sometimes disagrees.
Sources for the prices and rates in this section: Owner.com pricing; ChowNow pricing, read 4 Oct 2026. A company can change them; its own page is what counts.
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