THE SHORT ANSWER Delivery marketplaces charge restaurants published partner-plan commissions of roughly 15%, 25%, or 30% of the order subtotal, plus payment processing, marketing, and promotion charges. New York City's 2025 fee law allows up to 43% in total fees while capping the basic plan that unlocks it at 23%. The fees aren't hidden — they're spread across enough documents that nobody sees the total.
Every month, the same ritual. The tablet says you sold one number. The bank deposit says a much smaller one. The owner sits down with both and tries to reconcile them, and the reconciliation never quite closes — because the difference isn't one fee. It's a commission on the subtotal, plus payment processing, plus marketing charges, plus a promotion you half-remember agreeing to, plus adjustments with codes nobody at the platform can explain on the first call.
Here's the thing: none of it is hidden. Every line item is disclosed somewhere — the partner agreement, the rate card, the statement footnotes. The fees aren't hidden; they're distributed. Spread across enough documents that no single page ever shows you the whole cost. This piece puts the whole picture in one place: what the marketplaces actually charge, what New York City just changed about it, and the arithmetic that tells you which orders belong on the apps and which ones never should have been there.
What the apps actually charge
The major marketplaces — DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub — publish their restaurant pricing as partner-plan tiers, and in New York City the tiers land in the same neighborhood across platforms: commonly around 15%, 25%, and 30% of the order subtotal (entry tiers run higher in other markets), with payment processing charged on top. Those are the published tiers at the time of writing. Read the current rate card before you sign anything, because the details move.
What the tiers buy is reach. The bottom tier gets you listed with a smaller delivery radius and minimal placement. The middle tier widens the radius and improves where you show up in the feed. The top tier buys maximum visibility — the platform actively puts your menu in front of more people. You are not paying three prices for the same service; you are paying three prices for three amounts of exposure.
And here's the honest part most rants skip: the apps genuinely deliver discovery. A marketplace puts your menu in front of people who would never have walked past your door, never searched your name, never known you existed. For that customer's first order, the commission is an acquisition cost — and a defensible one. Plenty of restaurants have filled slow nights on exactly that reach.
The problem isn't the first order. The problem is every order after it. The regular who orders from you every Thursday, who found you two years ago, who would type your name into their phone if you gave them a reason — that person is still being charged to you at acquisition prices. Every week. Forever. Paying to acquire a customer once is marketing. Paying to acquire the same customer week after week, for years, is rent.
What New York City just changed
If you operate in New York City, the ground moved in 2025, and it's worth getting the facts straight because most of the coverage got them backwards.
Under New York City's 2025 fee law — effective June 30, 2025 — platforms may charge restaurants up to 43% in total fees. The structure is capped by category: 15% for core delivery, 5% for basic marketing and visibility, 3% for card processing, plus up to 20% for optional "enhanced services." The law only lets a platform charge that enhanced fee if it also offers a basic plan capped at 23% total. When it took effect, every NYC restaurant on the apps received new plan notices.
Read that again: the ceiling went up, not down. The previous caps were tighter; the 2025 law legalized a 43% total for restaurants that opt into everything. The protection in the law is the mandatory 23% basic plan. The trap in the law is the word "optional" — because the optional 20% enhanced tier is where restaurant margins go to die. If your food margin is thinner than the enhanced fee stack, you are working Friday night for the platform.
Practically, that means every NYC operator now has a decision to make on paper that used to be made by default: basic plan or enhanced. And the only way to make it well is arithmetic, not vibes.
The arithmetic
Strip everything down to one order and the whole decision gets simple. Here's a $50 delivery order, run two ways, using the published numbers above.
That last line is the one to memorize. $10 ÷ 0.25 = $40. Once a delivery ticket clears about $40, a flat New York City fulfillment fee of roughly $10 beats a 25% commission — and the gap widens with every dollar of ticket above it. White-label fulfillment (DoorDash Drive, Uber Direct — the same drivers, dispatched under your name from your own website) is published at flat rates of roughly $7 per delivery at the time of writing, instead of a percentage.
Now run your own number. Pull your average delivery ticket off last month's statement and set it against the $40 line. If your average ticket is above it — and for most full-menu restaurants it is — every repeat order flowing through a percentage plan is a decision to pay more for the same delivery.
The hybrid play (don't rage-quit the apps)
The wrong conclusion from all of this is to storm off the marketplaces. The apps are paid discovery, and paid discovery works — that's precisely why it's expensive. The right conclusion is to stop using an acquisition channel as a retention channel. Marketplaces win you the stranger. Direct ordering keeps the regular. The whole strategy is a migration machine that moves customers from the first column to the second:
- A menu on your own site that actually takes orders. Not a PDF. A readable menu with a working order button, so "order direct" is a real instruction instead of a favor you're asking.
- A QR card in every bag. Every marketplace order you fulfill is a delivery to a customer you're about to pay for again. The card in the bag is your one shot at making the next order direct.
- An "order direct" offer. Give them a concrete reason for the first direct order — a deal you can fund out of the commission you're not paying on it.
- An owned email and SMS list with a real cadence. The marketplace keeps the customer data; your own site captures it. A list you own, messaged on a schedule, is the difference between hoping for reorders and scheduling them — we've written up the repeat-revenue math separately.
- Loyalty on the direct channel only. Points, freebies, birthday offers — all of it lives where the margin lives. The app order earns nothing; the direct order compounds.
None of this is exotic. It's plumbing. If you'd rather have it built than build it, that's exactly what our direct ordering setup is — the site, the ordering, the QR-to-list capture, and the cadence, done for you.
Own the relationship
We'll close with our own receipt, because we don't ask anyone to run a play we haven't run. We built our business — an insurance agency — on owned customer relationships. Two people, zero startup capital. The first month produced $227 in commission revenue. That book grew to $1.3M a year with roughly three-quarters of the book renewing — revenue that shows up because the relationship belongs to us, not to whichever platform introduced us.
The one-sentence version: renting your regulars back at acquisition prices is the leak; owning the relationship is the fix. The apps found them. That was worth paying for once. Keeping them is your job — and your margin.
Straight answers
Marketplace partner plans are published in tiers commonly around 15%, 25%, and 30% of the order subtotal, plus payment processing. Higher tiers buy more visibility and a wider delivery radius. Check the current published rate card before you sign — rates change, and in New York City the 2025 fee law sets its own caps.
Under New York City's 2025 fee law — effective June 30, 2025 — platforms may charge restaurants up to 43% in total fees: capped at 15% for core delivery, 5% for basic marketing, 3% for card processing, plus up to 20% for optional enhanced services. Platforms must also offer a basic plan capped at 23% total.
Not entirely — not if you want the discovery. Marketplaces put your menu in front of people who would never have found you, and that reach is worth paying for. The workable answer is hybrid: let the apps handle acquisition, then move repeat orders to your own site, where fulfillment runs at a flat rate instead of a percentage.
You take the order on your own website and a delivery network — DoorDash Drive or Uber Direct — supplies the driver under your name. Published rates at the time of writing are roughly $7 flat per delivery instead of a percentage of the ticket, and the customer relationship — the name, the email, the reorder — stays yours.
