Pizza is a 25% margin business. 30% commission turns every pie into a loss.
Zay-OS is commission-free direct ordering for pizzerias and slice shops. Half-and-half UX, topping modifiers at scale, slice-by-slice inventory, delivery-zone control, late-night scheduling, school + sports-team catering. $499/month flat. Live at Naya Grill today.
Zay-OS is commission-free online ordering built for pizzerias. It handles half-and-half pizza UX, 60+ topping modifiers, slice-by-slice inventory for slice shops, hard geographic delivery zones, late-night Friday scheduling, and sports-team catering. $499/month flat replaces the 30% marketplace commission that wipes out pizza\'s 25% margin.
What a pizzeria actually needs from an ordering platform.
Diners pick a left side and a right side, each with its own toppings, in a single flow. The kitchen ticket prints two clear halves — no decoding "1/2 sausage 1/2 mushroom only on the left half" notes during a Friday rush.
Pizzerias carry the heaviest modifier menu of any restaurant type. Zay-OS organizes toppings by category (meats, veggies, cheeses, sauces, finishing oils), enforces per-size add-on pricing, and never lets the diner break a build that the kitchen cannot execute.
Slice shops can sell individual slices online with per-style inventory (cheese, pepperoni, Sicilian, white). When the last slice of a tray sells, the option grays out automatically — no more apologizing at pickup.
Pizzerias are the only restaurant type with hard geographic delivery boundaries (you cannot deliver a hot pizza 40 minutes away). Draw the zone, set per-zone minimums and fees, auto-reject orders outside it.
Friday and Saturday 10pm-1am is when pizzerias make the week. Schedule different menus, fees, and zones for the late-night window — bar-crowd combos, smaller delivery radius, surge handling staff.
Pre-order 20 pies for the soccer team. Batched prep time, half-deposit on order, balance on pickup. The repeat customer flag means the coach can reorder the same 20 pies next Saturday in two taps.
Slice, DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub all flow into the same kitchen tablet as your direct orders. One ticket queue. One menu source of truth. No staff retraining when you turn a marketplace on or off.
Pizza shop food cost runs 28-32%, labor 30%, rent 8-10% — that leaves 25% before marketplace fees. $499/month flat replaces the 30% commission that was eating the entire margin.
Most pizza customers order the same pie 80% of the time. CRM stores the last order and surfaces "reorder your usual" — turns a 6-minute checkout into a 2-tap repeat.
Tickets route to the make-line printer you already have. The pizzaiolo never opens an app. The expo never checks a tablet. Order in, ticket out, pie on the screen.
Why pizzerias got squeezed first — and why direct ordering matters most here.
Pizzerias are the only restaurant type whose customers were trained to order online before the smartphone existed. Domino\'s ran Pizza Tracker ads in 2008. Pizza Hut had online ordering in 2007. By 2015, the average diner expected a pizza shop to let them order from a phone screen. Independents who could not build their own ordering tech defaulted to the big marketplaces — and the marketplaces collected 70% of an indie pizzeria\'s digital volume by 2020.
The math broke at the same time. Pizza food cost ran 28-32%. Labor 30%. Rent and utilities 8-10%. That left a 25% gross margin on a good week. A 30% effective DoorDash commission on the order then put the pie into a loss. Operators who looked at the P&L closely realized they were paying to deliver pizza — every marketplace order was a $4 net loss after commission, refunds, packaging, and the upcharged-then-discounted menu price the diner saw on the app.
Direct ordering does not magically fix the food-cost line. What it does fix is the commission line. A pizzeria doing 2,500 orders/month at $32 average ticket pays roughly $24,000/month in 30% marketplace commission. Zay-OS is $499/month flat for the same volume. The difference — about $23,500/month — is the entire dining-room renovation, two new make-line cooks, or the down payment on a second location. That is the actual leverage of commission-free direct ordering on a pizzeria P&L.
Naya Grill — already live. Your pie shop next.
Naya Grill is a Lebanese fast-casual brand running two FL locations on Zay-OS. Same setup works for a pizzeria: branded site for direct orders (zero commission), marketplaces ingested into the same kitchen printer via Otter, one menu, one ticket flow. The make-line never has to learn a new app — orders print on the printer they already use.
$499/month per location. No per-pie commission. Ever.
Operator is $499/month. Operator + Marketplace (Otter-ingested DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, Slice) is $599. Concierge for up to 5 locations or virtual brands is $699 flat. The diner pays a $2.99 per-order fee — the pizzeria keeps 100% of food revenue.
Full pricing breakdown →Asked by pizza-shop owners we have talked to.
Why are pizzerias hit harder by delivery commissions than other restaurants?
How does the half-and-half pizza ordering work on Zay-OS?
Can Zay-OS handle a slice shop selling individual slices?
How is Zay-OS different from Slice for pizzerias?
Does the delivery-zone feature actually prevent out-of-range orders?
What about the Friday/Saturday late-night surge?
Can I run sports-team and school catering pre-orders?
How much do pizzerias save by switching to Zay-OS?
Built for pie shops. Onboarding for July 1.
Run the free grader to see what your pizzeria lost to the marketplaces last month — or jump straight to getting started.