Most independent restaurant owners can quote their delivery-app commission rate from memory. Far fewer have actually sat down and calculated what that rate costs them across a full month — and the number is almost always higher than expected, because commission is rarely the only line item coming out of an order.
A typical marketplace order carries a commission of somewhere between 15% and 30% of the order subtotal, depending on the platform and the service tier the restaurant is enrolled in. On top of that base commission, orders are frequently subject to payment processing fees, and in some markets, additional platform service charges that reduce the payout further. None of these are hidden exactly — they're documented in merchant agreements — but they're rarely added up in one place, which is why the true cost tends to surprise owners the first time they actually total a month of statements.
Commission is the cost owners notice first, but it isn't the only one. Order history, contact details, and purchase patterns from marketplace orders stay with the platform, not the restaurant. A customer who has ordered ten times through a delivery app is, from the restaurant's side, still a stranger — there's no email address to send a Tuesday special to, no way to text a win-back offer after three months of silence.
That matters more than it sounds like it should, because repeat customers are where restaurant margin actually lives. A marketing list a restaurant owns is an asset that compounds. A list of orders sitting inside someone else's app is not.
There's also an operational cost that's harder to put a dollar figure on. When a delivery run takes longer than expected or an item arrives in worse shape than it left the kitchen, the review usually lands on the restaurant's page — even when the restaurant had no control over the courier, the route, or the wait time between pickup and drop-off. Reputation risk sits with the kitchen; the delivery logistics don't.
To be fair to the marketplace apps: they're genuinely good at one thing, which is putting a restaurant in front of people who've never ordered from it before. Plenty of independent owners can point to dine-in regulars who found them first through a delivery app search. That discovery value is real, and it's the reason most restaurants don't fully walk away from marketplaces even after they've done the commission math.
The more common move — and the one that actually changes the monthly number — isn't leaving marketplace apps entirely. It's building a direct ordering channel for the customers who already know the restaurant, so repeat business stops paying a discovery fee it doesn't need. New customers still find the restaurant through the marketplace. Regulars order direct, at full margin, through a channel the restaurant actually owns.