Take a made-up but ordinary single location: 1,000 online orders a month at a $35 average ticket, so $35,000 a month in online food sales, all of it through delivery apps today. Marketplace base commission runs about 15% to 30%. The blended real cost, once delivery, marketing and processing fees stack on top, lands between 25% and 35%. Use 28% here. That is $9,800 a month leaving the restaurant.
No restaurant moves every app diner to direct ordering, and we will not pretend otherwise. So model it conservatively. Say 30% of those orders, the regulars who already know your name, start ordering on your own site. That is 300 orders, $10,500 a month carrying no commission at all. At 28% blended, $2,940 a month stays in the restaurant, or $35,280 a year. The $599 plan costs $7,188 a year. Net, this example location keeps about $28,092 in year one.
The break-even is the number worth writing on the wall. At a 28% blended marketplace cost, a $599 plan is covered once roughly $2,140 a month of sales move to direct ordering. At a $35 ticket, that is about 61 orders a month, or two a day. Everything past two direct orders a day is margin you keep.
Across our own modeling, a location that shifts meaningful volume to direct ordering keeps somewhere between $48,000 and $300,000+ per location per year, at 3,000 to 12,000 orders a month. Naya Grill, in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, is the restaurant live and taking direct orders on Zayos today, and keeps $48k+ a year that used to go to commissions. Run your own numbers instead of ours with the free AI report or the commission calculator, and see what the apps charge on the DoorDash commission breakdown.