◆ Raleigh · Onboarding now

Raleigh diners keep turning over. Your customer list should not.

Commission-free online ordering for Raleigh and Triangle restaurants, on your own branded site. The delivery apps keep running and land on the same kitchen tablet. You keep 100% of the food revenue and 100% of the tips.

Quick answer

Zayos gives a Raleigh restaurant its own branded ordering site, so direct orders pay no commission. DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub charge 15% to 30% base commission, and 25% to 35% as a blended real cost once in-app marketing, promotions and processing stack on top. Zayos is flat instead: $499, $599 or $699 per location per month, month to month, no setup fee. The only per-order charge is a service fee the diner pays at checkout, $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, $0 dine-in and 10% on catering, and the restaurant keeps 100% of food revenue and 100% of tips. Modeled at 3,000 to 12,000 orders a month, a location keeps $48,000 to $300,000 or more per year. Zayos is built by Zay Revenue Group in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, is live and taking orders at Naya Grill in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, and is onboarding Raleigh operators now.

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The Raleigh problem

Demand is not your problem. Churn is.

Most Triangle operators are not short of customers. They are short of the same customers. Research Triangle Park keeps pulling new people into Wake County from bigger metros, and NC State pushes a new class down Hillsborough Street every August and takes one away every May. A Raleigh kitchen spends its life re-earning a base that will not sit still.

That is the exact condition the delivery apps are built to profit from. A new arrival with no local loyalties opens DoorDash, finds you, and orders. The app keeps the name, the phone number and the order history. You paid a 25% to 35% blended cut for an introduction you were never allowed to keep, and you pay it again on the next order, and the one after that.

You can pay a marketplace to introduce you to a new neighbor. You should not have to pay it again every time that neighbor orders.

Direct ordering does not mean firing the apps. It means the apps do the introducing and you keep the relationship. Every order placed on your own site puts that diner into a customer list you own, meaning names, phone numbers and order history you can text or email without a middleman. In a city where a third of your regulars will move in the next three years, the restaurant that owns its list is the one that survives its customers moving away.

The math on one ticket

A $32 pickup order, three ways.

Channel Diner pays extra You keep
Marketplace, 25% blended Their fees, set by them $24.00
Marketplace, 30% blended Their fees, set by them $22.40
Zayos direct pickup $0.99 service fee $32.00 plus 100% of the tip

Worked example on a $32 ticket, not a promise about your restaurant. Your real blended rate depends on your marketplace tier and how much you spend on in-app promotions, which is why the free report reads your own numbers instead. Delivery costs the diner $2.99, dine-in QR ordering costs $0, catering is 10%, and the restaurant never pays any of it. See the full breakdown on what DoorDash charges restaurants or run your volume through the commission calculator.

Where a Raleigh order comes from

Twelve districts, twelve different order patterns.

A Hillsborough Street counter and a North Hills catering kitchen have almost nothing in common except the commission bill. Both of them are worth moving to direct, for different reasons.

Downtown / Fayetteville St
Weekday office lunch, plus convention center and amphitheater event nights.
Warehouse District
Food hall and walk-up trade around Morgan Street. Pickup heavy.
Glenwood South
Late and bar adjacent. Weekend peaks, smaller tickets, high repeat.
Hillsborough St
NC State. Small tickets, very high frequency, term-time swings.
Village District
Lunch trade and family pickup orders on the way home.
Five Points
Neighborhood regulars. The classic reorder base.
North Hills
Office towers and hotels. The strongest catering demand in the city.
Oakwood / Boylan Heights
Residential. People who order from the same four kitchens all year.
Brier Creek
Airport and hotel corridor. Travelers plus a dense suburban base.
Cary, Chatham St
A real South Asian dining destination. Family sized orders.
Morrisville / RTP
Weekday research park lunch. Predictable, schedulable volume.
Apex, Garner, Wake Forest
Suburban pickup. Long drives, so scheduled orders win.

Plus the rest of Wake County and the wider Triangle, including Holly Springs, Fuquay-Varina, Knightdale and Clayton.

What we can honestly claim

We have no Raleigh restaurants yet.

That is the honest position, and you should expect it in writing from any vendor pitching you. Zayos is built by Zay Revenue Group, a Fort Lauderdale, Florida company. Raleigh is a market we are onboarding into, not one we already serve.

What is real: Naya Grill, a Lebanese fast casual brand with locations in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, is live and taking direct orders on Zayos today, and keeps $48k+ a year that used to go to marketplace commissions. Seven more storefronts are built and open ordering at their own launch dates. That is the whole customer list, and it is deliberately short because the product is young.

Everything else on this page is either a published price, a marketplace rate you can verify on the apps' own pages, or arithmetic on a stated example. If you want a number specific to your restaurant rather than to a modeled range, the free AI report does that in about a minute, and you can read the method on how it works.

Flat pricing, per location

$499 a month. No commission, ever.

Operator is $499. Operator + Marketplace is $599 and adds DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub ingestion through Otter, so every channel lands on one tablet. Concierge is $699 and includes up to 5 virtual brands per kitchen. All three are per location per month, month to month, with no setup fee and no contract. The diner pays the service fee at checkout, $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, $0 dine-in, 10% catering. You keep 100% of the food revenue and 100% of the tips.

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Straight answers

What Raleigh owners ask first.

Do you have any restaurants in Raleigh right now?
No, and we will not pretend otherwise. Zayos is built by Zay Revenue Group, a Fort Lauderdale, Florida company. One restaurant is live and taking orders on Zayos today: Naya Grill, a Lebanese fast casual brand with locations in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, which keeps $48k+ a year that used to go to marketplace commissions. Seven more storefronts are built and open ordering at their own launch dates. Raleigh is a market we are onboarding into now, so you would be early. If another vendor shows you a wall of Raleigh logos, ask them which of those restaurants is actually taking orders today.
Half my regulars move away every couple of years. Is building my own customer list even worth it here?
It is worth more in Raleigh than in most cities, precisely because of the turnover. Research Triangle Park keeps pulling new residents in and NC State cycles a new class through Hillsborough Street every year, so a Raleigh kitchen is always re-earning its base. When that first order comes through DoorDash or Uber Eats, the app keeps the name, the phone number and the order history, and you pay 25% to 35% blended for an introduction you never get to keep. Direct ordering flips that. The marketplaces can still do the introducing. From the second order on, the customer is in your own list and you can reach them without paying anyone.
What does one order actually cost me compared to DoorDash?
Take a $32 pickup order. Marketplace commission, meaning the cut DoorDash, Uber Eats or Grubhub take off the top, runs 15% to 30% on the rate card and closer to 25% to 35% as a blended real cost once in-app marketing, promotions and processing stack on it. At 25% blended you keep $24.00 of that $32 and the app keeps $8.00. On your own Zayos site you keep the full $32.00 plus 100% of the tip, and the diner pays a flat $0.99 pickup service fee at checkout. Delivery is $2.99 to the diner, dine-in QR ordering is $0, catering is 10%. The restaurant never pays the service fee.
I do a lot of $12 to $18 orders off Hillsborough Street. Does a flat fee help or hurt me?
Flat helps you most at exactly that ticket size. A percentage does not care that a $14 order carries the same labor as a $40 one, so small-ticket, high-frequency kitchens are the ones percentage pricing punishes hardest. At 25% blended, a $14 order hands $3.50 to the app. On your own site the diner pays $0.99 and you keep the $14. The student ordering three times a week is the best customer in Raleigh to move off the marketplace first, because the savings compound every single week of the semester.
Do I have to leave DoorDash and Uber Eats to do this?
No, and we would tell you not to. The apps are good at first-time discovery, which matters in a metro adding new residents constantly. On Operator + Marketplace at $599 per location per month, Otter, an order aggregator that puts every sales channel on one tablet, pulls your DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub tickets into the same screen as your direct Zayos orders. Your kitchen learns one screen, not four. The apps keep bringing strangers. Your regulars move to direct, where you pay no commission on them.
I run a barbecue pit and a wing brand out of the same kitchen. Can one plan cover both?
Yes. Concierge is $699 per location per month and includes up to 5 virtual brands per kitchen, which is the setup for exactly that: an eastern North Carolina barbecue name out front and a wings or biryani concept running off the same line. One menu source of truth, one tablet per location, one dashboard. Billing stays per location, so a downtown Raleigh flagship and a Cary or North Hills second store are two locations, not two accounts.
How fast could I actually be taking direct orders?
Most operators are live in under 2 weeks, and the first direct order usually lands within a week of signing up. There is no setup fee and plans are month to month with no contract. Onboarding covers the branded ordering site, the menu build with modifiers, payments, and on Operator + Marketplace the Otter connection that routes the apps into the same tablet.
Is this just a website, or does my kitchen have to learn a new system?
It is an ordering system with a site on the front of it, and the kitchen side is deliberately boring. Orders print or land on the tablet the same way marketplace orders already do. You get a customer list you own, meaning names, phones and order history you can market to, plus automatic sales-tax set-aside through DAVO so the tax money is moved out before you spend it. If you have a POS, meaning your point of sale register system, we work around what you already run rather than asking you to replace it.
Keep reading
Indian restaurant operators →
Menu depth, spice modifiers, family sized orders. Built for the Cary and Morrisville corridor.
Taqueria operators →
High frequency, tight margin kitchens, where a percentage hurts most.
Atlanta ordering →
The same commission math in the Southeast's largest restaurant market.
Also: what Zayos is · how it works · integrations · pricing · all cities

See what last month cost you.

The free report runs your real ticket average and your real marketplace mix, and tells you what direct ordering would have kept. Most operators are live in under 2 weeks after that.

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