You can count your regulars. Zayos means you stop renting them.
Zayos is commission free online ordering on a Gulfport restaurant's own website. Gulfport is a repeat market, not a discovery market, so a percentage of every ticket is rent on regulars you already earned. Plans are $499 to $699 a month per location, flat.
Free. About 60 seconds. No card.
Why is commission the wrong shape of price for Gulfport?
Because a percentage is what you pay for churn, and Gulfport does not have any. The town is about 2.8 square miles of low rise waterfront wrapped by St Petersburg on three sides, roughly twelve thousand residents, a few dozen kitchens and effectively no chains. Beach Boulevard South runs down to the water, the ballroom and the marina sit at the end of it, and the same people walk that street on Tuesday that walked it last Tuesday.
A marketplace prices its cut as a finder fee. That price makes sense in a market where new customers arrive constantly and never come back. Gulfport is the opposite. The kitchens here live on a small, loyal, repeating base, and the app is charging a finder fee on a person who has been eating your food for six years and could walk to your door.
In a town where the same few hundred households order over and over, a percentage of every ticket is not a marketing cost. It is rent on a relationship you already built.
What is that rent worth on a small kitchen?
Small town volume looks harmless per order and ugly per year. The number below is a modest Gulfport kitchen, not a busy one, and it is still the cost of a full time employee.
- 310 marketplace orders a month at a $27 average ticket = $8,370 of app volume
- At a 28 percent blended cost = about $2,344 a month
- Roughly $28,100 a year out of one small waterfront kitchen
- Those 310 orders are usually 200 to 260 distinct households, not 310 strangers
- Zayos Operator = $499 a month, $5,988 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.
The customers keeping a Gulfport restaurant open number in the hundreds, not the thousands. That is a list one owner can actually hold, and it is the single asset a delivery app will never hand over.
How do I move regulars across without going dark?
Five steps, in this order. Nothing here asks you to switch off a channel on day one, which is the mistake that makes owners abandon the move in week two.
- 01
Put the ordering on your own address first
Your branded site goes live on your own domain, with your menu, your modifiers and your own pickup and delivery radius. It is the link you hand out, print on the receipt and pin to your Google profile. Nothing about it routes through a marketplace.
- 02
Put a QR code where the regulars already stand
The counter, the patio table, the takeout bag, the market stall on Beach Boulevard. It opens your ordering page in the phone browser with no app to install, which matters when your customer is 63 and does not want a fourth food app.
- 03
Keep the apps running while the list fills
Operator + Marketplace ingests DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub into the same kitchen tablet via Otter, so nothing goes dark and the line reads one queue. You are not making a leap, you are shifting the repeat orders one at a time.
- 04
Capture the name on every direct order
Each direct order adds a real customer to a list you own: name, phone, email, what they ordered and how often. A marketplace will never give you that, because that list is the product they are selling back to you.
- 05
Reorder is one tap, so the habit moves
Once someone has ordered directly twice, their usual is a single tap on your site. That is the whole game in a town this size. You do not need to win a market, you need a few hundred households to change one habit.
What do market days and ballroom nights do to a small kitchen?
Gulfport spikes on a schedule everyone here knows. The market on Beach Boulevard, the art walk evenings, the dances and private bookings at the waterfront ballroom, the boat crowd off the marina. A town that spends most of the week at a steady simmer goes to a boil for a few hours, and a kitchen with four burners and two cooks feels it immediately.
Owning the ordering is what makes those hours survivable. You take preorders for pickup before the crowd arrives, quote your own ready times instead of a marketplace guess, mark the special sold out the second the last portion goes, and close ordering when the board is full. The catering side is the bigger prize: private parties and event bookings are large single tickets with days of lead time, and on Zayos catering carries a 10 percent fee paid by the person ordering, while the restaurant keeps 100 percent of the food revenue.
A percentage model takes its largest single bite out of the order you worked hardest to get, the catering tray, not the $14 sandwich.
What does Zayos cost in Gulfport?
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 a radius you set, the kitchen tablet, and the customer list. Operator + Marketplace is $599 and adds Otter ingestion so DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub tickets appear in the same feed while you shift the repeats. 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 and 10 percent on catering, and the restaurant keeps 100 percent of food revenue and tips. Detail on the pricing page, the counter service flow in the cafe playbook, and the event side in the catering playbook.
Who builds Zayos, and is anyone here on it?
Zayos is built by Zay Revenue Group, a Fort Lauderdale company. Nobody in Gulfport is live on it, and in a town this small a made up reference would be found out by lunchtime. 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 more storefronts are built and open ordering at their own launch dates.
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, or read how it works for the onboarding order.
Questions Gulfport owners ask.
Why is a percentage the wrong price for a town of 12,000?
How many customers does a Gulfport restaurant actually need?
My customers are locals who already know me. Will they use a website?
What about market days, art walks and events at the Casino ballroom?
Is catering worth setting up for a small Gulfport kitchen?
Is a Gulfport restaurant live on Zayos right now?
Count what you paid to be introduced to your own regulars.
The free report reads your real numbers and shows what a year of finder fees cost a kitchen that never needed finding.