Skip the 30% Commission: What a Food Delivery App Development Company Can Build for You

A food delivery app development company builds a branded ordering app that your restaurant owns. Orders from regular customers stop running through a marketplace that takes a cut of each one. The major platforms have a deduction percentage of 30% per transaction, based on your plan and country. For a busy kitchen, it adds up fast. Your own app won’t make costs disappear, but it does change who keeps the customer. That’s the kind of platform teams at The Mad Brains build for restaurants that want their regulars back. 

Where Does the Commission Money Go?

Aggregators aren’t charging for nothing. A big part of that fee pays for discovery, which marketplaces do well. A hungry stranger scrolls, spots a photo of your pizza, and orders from a place they’d never heard of.

The trouble is your regulars.

Picture a two-site pizza shop with a loyal Friday-night crowd. Those customers would order anyway, yet every order carries the full commission. The platform also holds their order history and contact details, so the shop can’t send them a loyalty offer or even see who they are.

What Does Your Own Ordering App Include?

Less than a full marketplace, and that’s the point. Restaurant app development for a single brand usually covers:

• Menu that includes modifiers like extra cheese, no onions, half-and-half.
• Delivery, collection, or both
• Card and wallet payments through a provider like Stripe or Square
• Order tracking and push notifications
• Loyalty points or a one-tap “order again” button
• An admin panel for menu changes, opening hours, and refunds

A multi-restaurant marketplace is a different beast. That’s on demand food delivery app development at a much bigger scale, with vendor onboarding, your own commission logic, and separate apps for customers, restaurants, and drivers. A single restaurant rarely needs all that.

Do You Still Need Delivery Drivers?

This is the part of restaurant app development people forget to plan. Leaving the marketplace means someone else has to get the food to the door. 

Options :

• Your own drivers
  How it works : You hire and schedule riders, and the app assigns orders
  Good fit when : You already deliver or have steady volume
• On-demand couriers
   How it works : A courier is booked per order through an integration, typically for a per-delivery fee
  Good fit when : Volume is uneven, or you’re testing delivery
• Collection only
  How it works : Customers order ahead and pick up
  Good fit when : Volume is uneven, or you’re testing delivery  

How it works : You hire and schedule riders, and the app assigns orders

Good fit when : You already deliver or have steady volume

Courier services and their pricing vary by country, so check what’s available where you trade before you commit.

Is Building Your Own App Worth the Cost?

App costs include development, upkeep, credit card processing, and user acquisition.

The maths is simple enough to do yourself. Take the number of monthly orders from repeat customers and multiply it by the average commission you pay on them. Then compare that figure with what the app would cost to run. A good food delivery app development company will work through these numbers with you before quoting anything.

One opinion worth holding onto: don’t quit the marketplaces on day one. Keep them for discovery, and give regulars a reason to switch, like a free side on their first direct order or a card in every delivery bag. Solid food app development plans for that hybrid setup from the start, with menus that sync so you’re not changing prices in three places.

What to Ask a Food Delivery App Development Company

Before signing anything, get clear answers to these:

• Can the app connect to our POS, so staff isn’t retyping orders from a tablet?
• Will the menu stay in sync with the marketplaces we keep using?
• Do we own the code, the customer data, and the app store accounts?
• Who fixes things when ordering breaks at 7 p.m. on a Friday?

POS integration is where many food app development projects get fiddly, so ask to see one they’ve done. Then try ordering in an app they’ve built. If adding a pizza with three toppings takes eight taps, your customers will drift back to the marketplace. 

Design-led teams spend a lot of time on that flow, and it’s a big part of how MadBrains approaches food and beverage app design and development. If you’re planning several brands under one app, ask whether the team has handled on demand food delivery app development at marketplace scale.

Conclusion

Marketplaces are good at finding new customers, and they charge for it. Your regulars are a different story. They already know you, and every order they place through someone else’s app costs you a cut and a direct relationship. If you’re weighing up your own app, talk to the Mad Brains team. As a design-led food delivery app development company, they’ll start with how your customers like to order and build from there.