A $12 Cuban sandwich cannot carry a percentage. Zayos charges a flat monthly fee instead.
Zayos is commission free online ordering for Cuban restaurants in Tampa and Ybor City. Plans are $499, $599 or $699 a month per location, flat. The diner pays $0.99 pickup or $2.99 delivery. You keep 100 percent of food revenue and every tip.
Free. About 60 seconds. No card.
Why does marketplace commission hurt a Cuban counter more than a steakhouse?
Because a percentage does not care what your ticket is, and a Cuban counter has the thinnest ticket in Tampa. Marketplace commission runs 15 to 30 percent as a base rate and 25 to 35 percent as a blended real cost once delivery, in app marketing and card processing stack on it. A steakhouse pays that on a $95 check. You pay it on a $12 sandwich, four hundred times a week.
Twenty eight percent of a $12 Cuban sandwich is $3.36, which is roughly what the bread, the pork and the press cost you in the first place.
The same arithmetic run across a real Tampa lunch menu, at 28 percent, the midpoint of that blended range:
| The ticket | Total | App takes at 28% | You keep on Zayos |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cuban sandwich, chips, cafe con leche The counter lunch, ordered three times a week by the same person. | $12.00 | $3.36 | $12.00 |
| Roast pork plate, black beans, rice, plantains One plate, one drink, eaten at a desk on Kennedy Blvd. | $18.00 | $5.04 | $18.00 |
| Family pickup dinner for four Friday night, picked up on the way home to Seminole Heights. | $34.00 | $9.52 | $34.00 |
| Office tray, sandwiches and sides for ten Catering, where the margin actually lives. | $145.00 | $40.60 | $145.00 |
Modeled from the ticket sizes shown at a 28 percent blended cost, not a customer result. On Zayos the diner pays the service fee at checkout, $0.99 pickup or $2.99 delivery, and 10 percent on a catering order, so the $145 tray costs the guest $14.50 and costs you nothing. Change the inputs and the answer changes. The free AI report runs it on your real order count.
My whole day happens in 90 minutes. Does online ordering help or make it worse?
It helps, but only if the orders arrive spread out instead of all at once. A Cuban counter is not limited by the register, it is limited by the press. Every sandwich holds a plancha for the same minutes whether it came in person, by phone or through an app, and at 12:15 on a Tuesday there is no way to buy more press.
Scheduled pickup is the part that actually matters
On your own ordering site you set pickup windows and how many orders each window will take. An office worker who wants to eat at 12:30 can place the order at 9 in the morning, and that sandwich gets pressed at 12:22 instead of joining the pile. Marketplaces are built to push everything to as soon as possible, because their promise is speed to the diner. Your promise is a sandwich that has not been sitting in a bag.
One tablet, not four
If you keep the marketplaces, Otter ingests their tickets into the same kitchen screen as your direct orders, so the person on the plancha reads one queue in order. Four tablets on a shelf during a 90 minute rush is how a ticket gets missed, and a missed app ticket costs you the refund and the rating.
Ybor sells to tourists at night and to workers at noon. Which one is this for?
Both, but they are worth very different money to you, and that is the thing most Tampa operators never separate. Ybor has been a food neighborhood since the cigar factories opened in 1885, and the mixto built with Genoa salami is the Tampa version of the sandwich, a detail that came from the Italian families who worked alongside the Cuban and Spanish ones. Tampa city council named it the city's signature sandwich in 2012. That heritage is why people fly in for it.
The visitor who walks 7th Avenue on a Saturday, the cruise passenger in from Channelside, the crowd that shows up for Gasparilla in late January or the state fair in February, that customer orders once. Paying a marketplace 28 percent to reach them is a defensible cost of doing business, because you would not have reached them otherwise.
Paying the same 28 percent on the West Tampa regular who has ordered the same medianoche every Thursday since 2019 is not marketing, it is a subscription fee for a customer you already own.
Tampa also has a real off season. Heat and rain flatten the walk up trade from June through September, and the tourist half of the business goes quiet while the office and hospital lunch half does not. A customer list you own is how you keep talking to the half that stays, and on Zayos that list is yours, which is not true of anything the marketplaces hold.
Where does catering fit, and why is it the part worth protecting?
Because trays are the only place a Cuban kitchen gets a big ticket without changing what it cooks. Sandwich platters for a Westshore office, bandejas of roast pork and yellow rice for a birthday, a whole pig for Nochebuena, ten dozen croquetas for a school event. On the marketplaces those orders either do not fit the format or get taxed at the same rate as a single sandwich, which on a $600 tray is $168 gone.
On Zayos catering carries a 10 percent fee that the diner pays at checkout, and it goes through a catering flow with lead times, headcount and a deposit rather than the standard 30 minute pickup path. Read the catering setup for how the order form and lead times work.
Can my Spanish speaking customers order in Spanish?
Yes, and in Hillsborough County that is not a nice extra. Roughly a third of the county speaks Spanish at home, and in West Tampa and parts of Ybor the share is far higher. Your Zayos menu can carry item names and descriptions in both languages, which matters most for the things that have no clean English name anyway. Nobody wants to order a fried ham and cheese roll when they meant a croqueta preparada. We publish our own Spanish language pages at zay-os.com/es for the same reason.
What does $499 a month actually get a Tampa restaurant?
Operator is $499 a month per location: a branded ordering site on your own domain, the menu with modifiers, pickup and delivery with a radius you set, the kitchen tablet, and a customer list that belongs to you. Operator + Marketplace is $599 and adds Otter ingestion so app tickets print in the same feed. Concierge is $699 with up to five virtual brands out of one kitchen, which is how one Ybor line runs a sandwich brand and a late night brand at once.
All three are month to month, no setup fee, no commission at any volume. Detail sits on the pricing page, the timeline on how it works, the definition on what Zayos is.
Is anybody in Tampa running Zayos today?
No. Zayos is built by Zay Revenue Group, a Fort Lauderdale company, and we serve Tampa from South Florida. We do not have an office in Ybor and will not pretend we do. The restaurant live and taking orders right now is Naya Grill, in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, which keeps $48k+/yr that used to leave as marketplace commission at roughly 3,000 orders a month. Seven more storefronts are built and open ordering at their own launch dates.
What we can put in writing is the timeline, not a Tampa reference: most operators are live in under 2 weeks, with a first direct order usually inside the first week.
Questions Tampa Cuban operators ask.
Do I have to leave DoorDash and Uber Eats to use Zayos?
Can the menu handle a Cuban sandwich the way we actually build it?
Will my regulars order online instead of calling?
How fast can a Tampa Cuban restaurant be live on Zayos?
I have a second location in West Tampa. How does pricing work?
Do you take a cut of the tips?
Is there a Cuban restaurant in Tampa already running Zayos that I can call?
Run the number on your own sandwich.
The free report uses your real order count and average ticket to show what the apps took last month, and what a flat $499 would have cost instead.