Main Street already found your customer. Zayos ends the finder fee in Dunedin.
Zayos is commission free online ordering on a Dunedin restaurant's own website, built pickup first for a downtown where people arrive on foot, by bike, and by golf cart. Plans run $499 to $699 a month per location. The diner pays $0.99 on pickup.
Free. About 60 seconds. No card.
Why is marketplace commission the worst deal in Pinellas for a downtown Dunedin restaurant?
Because you are buying something the town gives you for free. Almost every Pinellas market is a drive past market where a restaurant genuinely struggles to be seen. Dunedin is the exception. Main Street and Douglas Avenue are a real walking district, the Pinellas Trail runs straight through the middle of it, the marina and Edgewater Drive pull people along the water, golf carts are an actual mode of transport here, and there is a festival, a parade or a market on the calendar most months of the year.
Discovery is the product a marketplace sells. Downtown Dunedin produces its own every day, with patios full of people who can see your sign from where they are standing. Paying 15 to 30 percent base commission, or 25 to 35 percent blended once delivery, in app marketing and processing pile on, to meet somebody already outside your door is the purest waste in the county.
If your customer can see your front door from the sidewalk, you should not be paying a percentage to be introduced to them.
What does a pickup first build look like here?
It starts by admitting how people actually reach you. A good share of your orders come from within a mile: somebody walking down Main Street, a rider stopping off the Pinellas Trail, a cart coming in from the neighborhoods off Patricia or Highland, a boat crew at the marina. None of them need a courier. They need to order early, walk in, and not stand around.
So the Zayos build for a Dunedin restaurant leads with order ahead and pickup: a quoted ready time, a QR code for the patio table or the counter, and no app install between a hungry person and their order. Delivery is still there for the neighborhoods and you set the radius, but the center of the build is the short trip, because that is the trip Dunedin makes.
And the pickup orders on the apps are the clearest loss
A pickup order placed through a marketplace by somebody two blocks away still gives up a cut of the ticket. No driver was dispatched, no new customer was found, nothing was delivered. On Zayos that order carries a $0.99 service fee paid by the diner, and the restaurant pays nothing per order.
- 520 marketplace orders a month at a $29 average ticket = $15,080 of app volume
- At a 28 percent blended cost = about $4,222 a month
- Roughly $50,700 a year from one downtown address
- Zayos Operator + Marketplace = $599 a month, $7,188 a year, flat
A model from the order count and ticket above, not a customer result. The free AI report runs it on your real numbers in about a minute.
How do I survive spring training and a Honeymoon Island Saturday?
Dunedin gets shoved into a different gear a few times a year. Blue Jays spring training at TD Ballpark packs February and March. The Causeway pushes beach traffic through town every good weekend on the way to Honeymoon Island and the Caladesi ferry. The Highland Games and the downtown festival calendar do the rest. A small kitchen can take more orders in those weeks than it can physically cook, and a blown ready time does damage that outlasts the weekend.
Owning the ordering gives you the dial. You quote your own pickup times, mark an item unavailable the minute it runs out, and close ordering when the board is full. The other half of the surge is that visitors are one time customers and locals are not, so the list you keep from a busy March is worth more than the March itself.
A tourist weekend is revenue once. The local who found you that weekend and is in your customer list is revenue every month after.
What does it cost, and what does the diner pay?
Operator is $499 a month per location and covers the branded ordering site on your own domain, the menu with modifiers, pickup and delivery with your own radius, the kitchen tablet, and a customer list that is yours. Operator + Marketplace is $599 and adds Otter ingestion, so DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub tickets appear in the same feed as direct orders while you shift the repeat business over. Concierge is $699 and adds up to five virtual brands from one kitchen.
Month to month, no setup fee, no commission. The diner pays $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, nothing on dine in, 10 percent on catering, and the restaurant keeps 100 percent of food revenue and tips. Detail on the pricing page, counter service in the cafe playbook, and the food truck playbook if a truck parks at your taproom.
Who builds Zayos, and is anyone in Dunedin on it?
Zayos is built by Zay Revenue Group, a Fort Lauderdale company. Nobody in Dunedin is live on it. The restaurant live and taking orders today is Naya Grill, at its Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach locations, which keeps $48k+/yr that used to leave as marketplace commission. Seven other storefronts are built and open ordering at their own launch dates.
We would rather say that than dress up a case study. What we commit to is the build: most operators are live in under 2 weeks and take a first direct order inside the first week. Start with what Zayos is if you want the definition first.
Questions Dunedin owners ask.
Why is a delivery app a bad deal for a walkable downtown restaurant?
What does pickup first actually mean on Zayos?
Do marketplaces really charge on pickup orders too?
How do I handle spring training and festival weekends?
I run a small taproom or brewery kitchen. Does this fit?
Is a Dunedin restaurant already live on Zayos?
Count what the apps took from a walk in town.
The free report reads your real numbers and separates the orders you paid to be found for from the ones that found you on Main Street.