Online ordering for independent restaurants, built by Zayos.
Published July 2026 · Updated October 4, 2026
Online ordering for independent restaurants means taking orders on your own site instead of renting a marketplace listing. An independent’s edge is the regular customer, so the system worth buying is the one that captures that diner, routes every channel to one tablet, and bills the same each month.
No setup fee. Month to month. We get you live in under a week.
Why is an independent restaurant not just a small chain?
Software vendors describe restaurants by unit count, which hides the thing that matters. A 40 unit brand and a one location kitchen are not the same business at different sizes. They have different assets, different constraints and different ways of failing.
A chain’s asset is reach. It has more locations than any single diner will ever visit, so it optimises for consistency and for systems that survive being run by people who did not build them. An independent’s asset is the opposite: a small number of people who come back often, know the owner’s name and would notice if the restaurant closed. That is a smaller list and a much more valuable one per person.
A chain sells to strangers at scale. An independent sells to the same people over and over, which makes the customer list the only asset an independent owns that compounds.
The constraint is just as different. A chain has a marketing department, an IT contact and a director of operations. An independent has an owner who is also the buyer, the scheduler, and the person expediting at 7:40 on a Friday. Any system that needs a project plan will not get one. It has to be learnable in an afternoon by a new hire, and changeable from a phone by an owner standing in a walk in.
What does an independent hand over on a marketplace order?
Three things, and only the first one shows up on a statement.
The margin
Base commission is 15% to 30% on the published rate cards. Blended real cost is 25% to 35% once funded promotions, sponsored placement, processing and refund deductions stack. On a $32 ticket at 25% blended, that is $8 an order, on food you bought, prepped and cooked yourself.
The customer
You get an order, not a diner. The name, phone, email and order history stay inside the app. That is why the same customer costs you commission every time for years, instead of costing you nothing after the first visit.
The relationship when something goes wrong
A cold order, a missing side or a late driver becomes your review even when the driver was not yours. On a direct order you answer the phone yourself, fix it yourself, and keep the customer.
None of that makes the apps a mistake. They do a job an ordering platform does not: putting an unknown restaurant in front of a hungry stranger. The mistake is having no second channel, so a customer they introduced once keeps costing 25% to 35% blended for the next three years. The full breakdown of that number is on our delivery commission page and in the commission free ordering guide.
Which ordering platforms are actually built for an independent?
Most bad software decisions in this category are size mismatches: an independent buying enterprise tooling it has nobody to run, or a growing operator staying on a starter plan two years past the point it made sense. Read the "built for" column first. Prices are the ones each company’s own pricing page listed on 4 Oct 2026. Where a company lists none, the row says so.
| Platform | Built for | Price | What you gain | What you give up |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Square Online | One location, low online volume | $0 / $49 / $149 per month, plus 2.9% to 3.3% and 30 cents online | A working ordering page this week, on the account your register already uses. | Processing is the real bill at volume. Loyalty costs extra. Marketplace orders stay on their own tablets. |
| GloriaFood | No software budget at all | Free ordering tier, with paid add-ons. Check its own page for current prices | Genuinely free pickup ordering, live in an afternoon. | Its own site says "GloriaFood will reach end of life on April 30, 2027" (gloriafood.com, read 4 Oct 2026), so it is a stopgap. No marketplace ingestion. |
| Menufy | One predictable monthly number | $179 month to month, or $149 a month on an annual agreement | One plan, no tiers, no per order commission. | Processing and delivery rates are not published, and its own diner marketplace competes for your brand. |
| ChowNow | A small kitchen that gets slammed | $229 to $449 per month, setup $119 to $499, 2.95% plus 29 cents | Order throttling caps tickets per 15 minute slot, which protects a two person line. | Three costs stack before you sell anything: subscription, setup fee, processing. |
| Toast online ordering | Restaurants replacing the register | An add-on with no price shown, on a Toast POS plan from $0 or $69 per month | Ordering welded to the register, so the menu has one master. | You are buying a POS relationship, not an ordering product. Hardware terms come with it. |
| Olo | Multi unit brands with a development team | Not published. Quoted per brand | Enterprise ordering, dispatch and integrations at scale. | Custom quotes, annual contracts and an implementation an independent has nobody to staff. |
| Zayos | Independents doing real online volume, 1 to 15 locations | $399 / $499 / $599 per location per month, month to month, no setup fee | No commission, 100% of food revenue, and 100% of tips on pickup and dine-in, one Otter tablet for direct and marketplace, an exportable customer list, sales-tax reports. | A flat fee is the wrong shape below roughly 150 online orders a month. Buy it when the volume is there. |
Card processing is excluded from the Menufy and Zayos rows because neither publishes an online processing rate, so read those as a floor and ask for the rate in writing. Full side by side pages: Square, ChowNow, Toast, Olo, Owner.com.
Sources for the prices and rates in this section: Square pricing and plans; Menufy pricing; ChowNow pricing; Toast pricing, read 4 Oct 2026. A company can change them; its own page is what counts.
At what volume should an independent actually buy?
Use one number: online orders per month. At a $32 average ticket, a 25% blended marketplace take costs $8 an order. A $499 Operator + Tablet plan costs $6.24 an order at 80 orders a month, $1.66 at 300, $1.25 at 400 and 50 cents at 1,000.
At a $32 average ticket, a $499 flat (Operator + Tablet) monthly plan costs less per order than a 25% blended marketplace take somewhere above roughly 60 direct orders a month, and less than most low cost subscription plus processing combinations above roughly 400 online orders a month.
In practice the honest thresholds are these. Under roughly 150 online orders a month, start on a low cost plan, prove your regulars will order direct, and do not sign a flat monthly platform. Between 150 and 400, it depends on which problem hurts more: kitchen capacity during a rush, or four tablets and four menus. Above 400, a flat plan is cheaper every month and gets cheaper as you grow, which is the only pricing shape that does.
One more figure for proportion. At 3,000 to 12,000 orders a month, an independent location gives up, on our model, somewhere between $48,000 and $300,000 or more per location per year to marketplace commission. Farooj Abo Alabed, live on Zayos, is on pace for $40k+ a year in commission not paid to a marketplace: its direct food sales after discounts from 10 Aug to 3 Oct 2026 (55 days), annualized at a 35% blended marketplace cost. Put your own numbers in the savings calculator.
What does the operating reality look like on a Friday night?
The pass is the real constraint
Three marketplace tablets plus a fourth for direct orders is not four systems. It is four places to miss a ticket at 7:40pm, and four screens someone has to acknowledge while plating. This is why most independents never start a direct channel: not price, not features, but the certainty that it adds a screen. Zayos routes direct orders into the same Otter tablet that already receives DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub, so the kitchen learns nothing new on day one.
Turnover means the system has to teach itself
A restaurant that hires four times a year cannot run software that requires training. If 86ing an item takes more than one tap, it will not happen during a rush, and the first customer to order the thing you ran out of finds out when the driver arrives. Ask any vendor to show you a new hire doing it, not an account manager.
One menu, or you will have four prices
Four channels with four separate menus means four prices, four 86 lists and four chances to sell what the walk in ran out of at 6:15. A single menu that pushes everywhere is worth more day to day than any feature on a sales deck. Our ordering best practices page covers photography, modifiers and pricing parity in detail.
Someone has to answer the phone
When orders stop arriving mid service, the difference between a bad night and a bad week is whether a person picks up. Ask who that person is and what hours they work before you ask about features. It is the least glamorous line in any contract and the one you will care about most.
Should an independent build its own ordering site?
Almost never, and the reason is not that it is hard to build. A developer can put a menu and a cart online in a fortnight. The ordering page is the easy part.
The parts that break later are menu sync across four channels, modifier logic that produces correct food instead of plausible food, payment settlement, refunds and chargebacks, sales tax handled correctly on every line of the receipt, and someone available at 7:40 on a Friday when orders stop arriving. A one off build leaves a single restaurant maintaining software by itself, usually after the developer has moved on, and usually costing more across three years than a subscription would have.
Build the brand, buy the plumbing. A restaurant that maintains its own ordering software is a software company with a kitchen attached.
Where custom work does pay is on top of a platform: your own domain, your own photography, your own voice, your own reorder cadence. If what you actually want is a better site, read the restaurant website builder page, and for a printed code that opens your ordering site, QR code ordering.
When is another vendor the better answer?
When your volume is low, Square Online at $0 to $149 a month is cheaper and good enough, and starting there is the correct move rather than a compromise. When you are replacing the register this year, buy the POS first and let ordering come with it. When you are a 40 unit brand with engineers, Olo is built for that and Zayos is not. When your real problem is that the room is empty, better ordering software does not fix demand, and a marketing led platform may be the better spend.
Zayos is built by Zay Revenue Group in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for independents with one to fifteen locations doing real online volume. Naya Grill in Pompano Beach is live and taking direct orders today. More restaurants are live and taking direct orders: Aker Sweets, Arwa Coffee, Courtyard Cafe, Farooj Abo Alabed, Juice Time, Kunafa King Cafe, Madent Al-Taybat Roastery, Melt N Dip, Rosto Grill & Café, Shishka Lebanese Grill, Socotra Yemeni Coffee & Co., Syrian Shawarma, Tacos Arabes, The Fryer House, Vinny’s and Yummy Grill.
The full ranked comparison with verified pricing is in our roundup of online ordering systems. If you want the product itself explained plainly, read what Zayos is, and if a term on this page was unfamiliar, the glossary defines it.
Source for the prices and rates in this section: Square pricing and plans, read 4 Oct 2026. A company can change them; its own page is what counts.
What independent owners ask us first.
What is online ordering for independent restaurants?
Is online ordering worth it for a single location restaurant?
Why should an independent restaurant not buy enterprise ordering software?
Should an independent restaurant build its own ordering site?
Can an independent restaurant keep DoorDash and still take direct orders?
How long does an independent restaurant take to go live?
Source for the prices and rates in this section: Square pricing and plans, read 4 Oct 2026. A company can change them; its own page is what counts.
Find out if you are past the line.
The free AI report reads your own order volume and average ticket and tells you what a direct channel is worth to your restaurant. 60 seconds, no card, no call.
Month to month. No setup fee. Live in under a week.
Talk to a person, or just start.
(954) 807-1509One number reaches support, account management and onboarding. Open 11am to 11:59pm ET, 7 days a week.
No setup fee. Month to month. We get you live in under a week.
See pricing Savings calculator Not ready yet? Get a free grade of your online ordering