The headline commission is not the whole bill
DoorDash and Uber Eats both publish tiered commission plans, and the range is easy to find: roughly 15 percent of the order subtotal on their cheapest tier, climbing to around 30 percent on the tiers that actually get you meaningful placement and delivery coverage. Most operators who want visibility end up somewhere in the upper half of that range.
The commission line is where the conversation usually stops. It should not. Sitting on top of it are several other costs that come out of the same order. There is in-app advertising and sponsored placement, which is technically optional but functionally near-mandatory once your competitors are bidding for the same customers. There are the promotions you fund yourself — free delivery thresholds, buy-one-get-one offers, first-order discounts — where the platform markets the deal but you eat the margin. And there are the adjustments: refunds and credits issued to customers for a missing side or a late order, often decided by the platform, deducted from your payout.
Stack those on the base commission and the effective share of a given order that leaves your business can climb toward a third. The 15 percent you saw in the pricing table is the floor, not the number that hits your bank account.
Why a third of the order is a problem at a 3-5% margin
Restaurant net margins are thin. Across full-service and quick-service, low single digits — commonly in the 3 to 5 percent range after food, labour, rent and overhead — is a realistic band for a healthy independent operator. That is the number a delivery commission has to be measured against, not revenue.
Do the comparison directly. If a direct order nets you 5 percent and a marketplace takes an effective 30 percent off the top of the same order, that order does not just make less money — it can be break-even or a loss before you have paid for the extra packaging and the staff time to make it. This is exactly why so many restaurants quietly run higher prices on the delivery apps than they do in-house. It works, but it is a tax on your own brand: customers notice the markup, and you have trained them to associate your food with the platform, not with you.
The uncomfortable truth is that on marketplace orders you are often renting demand at a price that only makes sense if you never intend to see that customer again on your own terms.
The break-even math you can run in five minutes
You do not need a consultant to work out whether a commission-free storefront pays for itself. You need three numbers you already have: how many online orders you do per month, your average ticket, and the effective commission you are paying once ads, funded promos and adjustments are included.
The formula is simple. Monthly commission cost equals orders per month multiplied by average ticket multiplied by effective commission percentage. That is the money currently leaving your business through the marketplaces. A flat, commission-free platform charges a fixed subscription instead, with no per-order cut. Your break-even is the point where the commission you avoid exceeds that subscription.
Here is an illustrative worked example — plug in your own figures. Say you run 400 online orders a month at a 32 dollar average ticket, at an effective 25 percent all-in take. That is 400 times 32 times 0.25, or 3,200 dollars a month going to commission. A flat monthly subscription is a fixed cost that does not scale with order volume. The important nuance: you will not move every order off the marketplaces overnight, and you should not expect to. But you do not have to. Because the subscription is fixed, every order you shift to direct is almost pure recovered margin, and the break-even usually lands after moving only a modest share — often your repeat and loyal customers, who were the least worth paying a 30 percent finder's fee on in the first place.
An illustrative operator: where the numbers move
Picture a two-location independent pizzeria — the kind of business Syntraq is built for, not a named customer or a promised result. Most of its online volume comes through the two big marketplaces, and the owner has made peace with the commission because the apps genuinely bring new customers who would never have found the shop otherwise.
The shift is not abandoning the marketplaces. It is changing their job. The apps stay on as a discovery channel — a way to be found. But the moment a customer has ordered once, the goal is to give them a reason to come back directly: a branded storefront on the pizzeria's own web address, live order tracking, a loyalty balance that only exists on the direct channel, and the occasional gift card or exclusive deal that never appears in the app. Over time the profile of each channel changes. New faces arrive via the marketplace at a commission you have accepted as an acquisition cost. Regulars — the profitable, predictable core — order direct at near-full margin, and their contact details, order history and preferences belong to the restaurant, not to a platform that can change its terms next quarter.
What commission-free actually requires (the honest part)
A direct storefront is not free demand, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. The marketplaces earn their commission on discovery — they put you in front of hungry people who have never heard of you. When you move ordering in-house you take on that job: you are now responsible for reminding customers you exist, through the loyalty programme, the gift cards, the email and SMS marketing, the deals.
The trade you are making is a per-order commission for a fixed cost plus ownership. On a direct channel you keep the customer relationship, the data, and the ability to market to that person again for free. That is the asset the marketplaces are renting back to you one order at a time. For a business with any meaningful base of repeat customers, owning that relationship is usually one of the highest-leverage changes available.
This is the piece Syntraq is designed around. Each location gets its own branded storefront on a subdomain or a custom domain, with the full menu, deals, loyalty and gift cards, and live order tracking — on a flat subscription with no per-order commission. The same order flows onto a live order board and a kitchen display, so going direct does not mean bolting on a second system.
Run your own numbers first
Before you talk to any vendor, including us, do the arithmetic above with your real order count, average ticket and effective take. If the commission you are paying is small and your repeat business is thin, the marketplaces may be the right tool for now, and that is a fair conclusion. If the number is large and a good share of it is regulars, a commission-free channel almost certainly pays for itself well before you have moved everyone across.
If you would like to see what a branded, commission-free storefront looks like running your own menu — with the POS, kitchen display and loyalty already connected — you can get in touch with Syntraq 360 and we will walk through it against your actual break-even math. No pressure to switch off the marketplaces on day one; most operators keep them for discovery and simply stop paying a third of every reorder.