The smallest ticket in New York does the biggest volume. Zayos charges by the month, not by the platter.
Zayos is flat fee ordering for New York halal restaurants. On a $13 chicken over rice platter, a marketplace takes about $2.60 even under the city commission cap. Zayos costs $499 to $699 a month per location and takes nothing per order.
Free. About 60 seconds. No card.
New York already capped delivery commission. Why is the app still the expensive way to sell a $13 platter?
New York City is the only major American city that permanently caps what a delivery marketplace can charge a restaurant. Local Law 88 of 2021 holds it at 15 percent for delivery plus 5 percent for every other service, and the delivery companies have been fighting it in court ever since. Everywhere else in the country the blended real cost runs 25 to 35 percent once delivery, in app marketing and card processing stack together.
So a New York halal operator pays less than a Houston one. That is the good news, and it is also the trap, because 20 percent of a $13 platter is about $2.60, and a platter that sells for $13 does not have $2.60 of room in it.
The cheapest commission in America is still a commission, and it is charged on the same regular who has been eating your food twice a week for six years.
What does a flat fee actually cost per order?
This is the part that gets skipped. A percentage costs the same on every ticket forever. A flat monthly fee divides by the number of orders, so it gets cheaper every time the line gets longer. Same $13 platter, Operator plus Marketplace at $599 a month, against the capped New York marketplace rate.
| Online orders a month | Zayos, per order | Marketplace, per order | Which is cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 250 | $2.40 | $2.60 | Flat fee |
| 500 | $1.20 | $2.60 | Flat fee |
| 900 | $0.67 | $2.60 | Flat fee |
| 1,500 | $0.40 | $2.60 | Flat fee |
| 3,000 | $0.20 | $2.60 | Flat fee |
The crossover sits near 230 online orders a month. Below that the commission is cheaper and you should keep taking it. Above it, every additional order on your own site costs you nothing, while every additional order in the app costs another $2.60.
Modeled at a $13 average ticket and the 20 percent New York cap, before card processing and before any in app advertising, neither of which the cap covers. Not a customer result. Run it on your own numbers with the free AI report, or see the commission statistics and what Grubhub charges restaurants.
Which shape is your halal business?
New York halal is not one business. It is at least three, and they need different things from an ordering site.
The counter shop
Chicken over rice, gyro, lamb platter, white sauce, out the window in four minutes. Almost all pickup and walk up, ticket under $15, order count enormous. This is the shape a percentage punishes hardest and a flat fee rewards hardest, because the fee per order falls every time the line gets longer.
The neighborhood full menu restaurant
Bay Ridge, Steinway Street, 74th Street, Coney Island Avenue. Mansaf, biryani, mixed grill, mezze for a table of eight. Bigger ticket, family sized modifiers, and a real weekend catering book. Here the value is a menu that can actually express a platter for six without turning into a phone call.
The cart or the truck
No dining room, no delivery address, a lunch window that opens and closes in 90 minutes. Scheduled pickup is the entire product: the customer orders from an office at 12:05 and collects at 12:40 without standing in your line. You do not need a delivery radius, you need a pickup clock.
The geography follows the same split. Midtown carts run on a 90 minute lunch clock. Bay Ridge, Steinway Street, 74th Street, Church Avenue, Coney Island Avenue and 116th Street run on family dinners, weekend platters and a catering book that never touches an app. One platform has to do both without pretending they are the same trade.
What happens on a block where the whole neighborhood is fasting?
Ramadan gives you two rushes and neither is at dinner time. Iftar lands on a single minute, so the ordering window closes about 30 minutes before maghrib and the kitchen batches everything to be ready at once instead of trickling out over an hour. Then the street comes back to life after taraweeh and runs toward suhoor before dawn.
On your own site you shorten the menu to what the line can turn out at 1am, change hours the moment you decide to, and turn delivery off while keeping pickup on. None of that needs a marketplace to approve it, and driver supply at that hour is thin and expensive anyway.
In a fasting month, the restaurant that controls its own clock keeps the orders. The one waiting for a platform to update its hours does not.
What is included, and what does the diner pay?
Operator is $499 a month per location: your branded ordering site on your own domain, the full menu with modifiers, scheduled pickup, delivery with a zone you draw, the kitchen tablet, and a customer list that belongs to you. Operator plus Marketplace is $599 and adds Otter ingestion so DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub print in the same feed. Concierge is $699 and includes up to five virtual brands out of one kitchen.
All three are per location, month to month, no setup fee, and no percentage of any ticket at any volume. The diner pays a flat service fee at checkout, $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 100 percent of tips. See the pricing page, the fee breakdown and how it works. Most operators are live in under 2 weeks.
Who is running Zayos right now?
One restaurant is live and taking orders on it today: 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. The wider model we publish, $48,000 to $300,000 or more kept per location per year, is stated at 3,000 to 12,000 orders a month, which is the range a busy New York counter actually lives in.
There is no New York halal restaurant on the platform yet. Zayos is a Fort Lauderdale company and we serve New York from there.
Questions New York halal owners ask.
New York caps delivery commission. Does that make the apps cheap enough?
My tickets are tiny. Is a flat monthly fee not worse for me?
Can a halal cart with no dining room use this?
What about Ramadan on a block where the whole neighborhood is fasting?
If I move to my own site, do I lose the marketplace customers I already have?
Who ends up owning the customer list?
Do you have a New York halal restaurant on the platform I can call?
Count your orders, then count the commission.
The free report runs your own order count and average ticket against a flat monthly fee, and shows the gap over a year.