Downtown, the app is an auction. Zayos is the channel nobody outbids you on.
Zayos is commission free online ordering on a downtown St Petersburg restaurant's own website. In a district this dense, a marketplace listing is an auction against your neighbors. Direct ordering is the one channel where nobody outbids you. Plans run $499 to $699 per location, monthly.
Free. About 60 seconds. No card.
Why does a downtown St Pete listing cost more than the commission on it?
Because you are not the only independent on the block. Downtown St Petersburg is one of the densest independent restaurant districts on Florida's west coast, and it is unusually free of chains. Beach Drive, Central Avenue from 1st to 5th, 2nd Street North, the Pier District and Jannus Landing put hundreds of owner run kitchens inside a fifteen minute walk of each other. That density is the reason the district works. It is also the reason a delivery app charges you twice.
In a thin market, a marketplace listing is a shelf. In a dense one, it is an auction. When two hundred kitchens sit inside the same delivery radius, position in that list decides who eats, and position is sold. So the operator who is already handing over a percentage of every ticket starts buying sponsored placement and running percentage off promotions on top, to defend a rank that resets the moment the neighbor raises their bid.
Commission is the price of the order. Sponsored placement is the price of being seen at all, and it only exists because your neighbors are in the same app.
A percentage of every ticket the app touches. 15 to 30 percent base, 25 to 35 percent blended once delivery, in app marketing and card processing stack on top. You pay it whether the customer found you in the app or typed your name into it.
Sponsored listings, percentage off promotions and free delivery offers, bought to move you up a list your neighbors are also bidding on. This bill only exists because downtown supply is dense. In a thin market nobody has to bid.
What do both bills add up to in a year?
Run it on a mid sized downtown kitchen doing steady app volume and a promotion budget that most Central Avenue operators would call modest. The commission line is the one everybody knows. The placement line is the one that never shows up in the conversation, because it looks like marketing rather than cost of sale.
- 640 marketplace orders a month at a $38 average ticket = $24,320 of app volume
- At a 28 percent blended cost = about $6,810 a month
- Sponsored placement and promotions at 6 percent of that volume = about $1,459 a month
- Both bills together, roughly $99,200 a year from one downtown address
- Zayos Operator + Marketplace = $599 a month, $7,188 a year, flat
A model from the order count, ticket and promotion rate above, not a customer result. The free AI report runs it on your real numbers in about a minute, and the calculator does the arithmetic by hand.
Which downtown blocks does this cover?
Downtown proper, the walkable grid where the density argument actually applies. The wider city, Grand Central, the EDGE District, Old Northeast, Kenwood and the Pinellas beaches, is covered on the St Petersburg page.
Half of downtown is a pickup order wearing a delivery fee
Look at where downtown orders come from. A condo tower on Beach Drive. An office on 1st Avenue North. A hotel room four blocks from your pass. A resident walking home from the Pier. Almost none of that needs a courier, and a good share of it is placed by someone who could see your sign from where they were standing when they opened the app.
So the Zayos build for a downtown kitchen leads with order ahead and pickup, with a quoted ready time and a QR code at the bar and on the patio table so a guest can order without waiting for a server or installing anything. Delivery stays on, with a radius you draw yourself. The point is that the short trip, which is most of downtown, stops carrying a percentage.
A pickup order placed through a marketplace by someone two blocks away still gives up a cut of the ticket. No courier was dispatched and no new customer was found.
What happens on a Grand Prix weekend or a Second Saturday?
Downtown St Pete does not have one season, it has a calendar. The street race in the spring closes the grid and fills every hotel. The monthly art walk moves thousands of people through the 600 block and the Warehouse Arts District. The Saturday morning market, the waterfront festivals and the museum calendar keep pulling crowds into the same square mile. On those days a small kitchen can take more orders than it can physically cook.
That is the day to own the dial. You set the quoted pickup time, you mark the item unavailable the minute the walk in line eats the last of it, and you close ordering when the board is full, without filing a request with a marketplace and waiting. The second half of it matters more. Event crowds are mostly one time customers, but the ones who live here are not, and the list you keep from a busy weekend is worth more than the weekend.
A festival Saturday is revenue once. The downtown resident who found you that Saturday and is now in your own customer list is revenue every month after.
What does it cost, and what does the diner pay?
Operator is $499 a month per location: the branded ordering site on your own domain, the menu with modifiers, pickup and delivery with your own radius, the kitchen tablet, and a customer list that belongs to you. Operator + Marketplace is $599 and adds Otter ingestion, so DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub tickets land in the same feed as your direct orders while you move the repeat business across. Concierge is $699 and adds up to five virtual brands from one kitchen.
Month to month, no setup fee, no commission, no placement to bid on. The diner pays $0.99 on pickup, $2.99 on delivery, nothing on dine in and 10 percent on catering, and the restaurant keeps 100 percent of food revenue and tips. Full detail on the pricing page, the marketplace side on Otter ingestion, and the on premise flow on QR code ordering.
Who builds Zayos, and is anyone downtown on it?
Zayos is built by Zay Revenue Group, a Fort Lauderdale company. Nobody in downtown St Petersburg is live on it. 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.
We would rather say that than dress up a case study for a city we do not operate in. 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 for the definition, or how it works for the onboarding sequence.
Questions downtown owners ask.
Why does a delivery app cost a downtown St Pete restaurant more than a suburban one?
If I stop bidding for placement, do I disappear?
Does a walkable downtown even need delivery?
What happens on Grand Prix weekend or a Second Saturday?
I run a chef owned place with a small menu. Is this built for me?
Is a downtown St Pete restaurant live on Zayos today?
Add up both bills before you renew the promotion.
The free report reads your real numbers and separates the commission from what you paid to sit above the restaurant next door.