In Lincoln your best day is your most expensive day. Zayos is the version where it is not.

A percentage fee is a partner that only shows up on payday. It costs you almost nothing in the third week of July and it costs you the most on the six or seven days a year you will remember. That is backwards for any restaurant, and it is especially backwards in Lincoln, where the difference between a slow night on O Street and a Haymarket night after an arena show is not twenty percent, it is triple.

A flat monthly fee is the only pricing model where earning more customers does not automatically cost you more money.

Lincoln has quietly become one of the more interesting food towns on the plains, largely because of who has settled here. Decades of refugee resettlement built a Vietnamese community, one of the largest Yazidi communities in the country, and Sudanese, Karen, Iraqi and Afghan families who opened grills, bakeries and grocery kitchens along South 27th and out toward the belt. Those are exactly the businesses a marketplace serves worst: heavy repeat customers who already know your name, large family orders, and menus a category tree cannot describe. Paying a quarter of every one of those tickets to an app to reach a customer who was already yours is the definition of rent.

The direct site fixes the ownership problem, not just the fee problem. Every order writes a name, a phone number and a full order history into a customer book that belongs to you, so before the next home stand you can text your own regulars instead of buying placement in someone else's app. Meanwhile the marketplaces keep running for the visitors who genuinely are strangers, ingested through Otter onto the same kitchen tablet so the line never watches four screens.