On this page: Where the margin goes
  1. Where the margin goes
  2. What we install
  3. The case study
  4. Free answers
  5. Straight answers
  6. Book the diagnosis
Own the order, own the customer

A restaurant online ordering system
you own — not one you rent.

Marketplace apps do one job well: discovery. Then they take a commission on every order from a customer you already earned — and keep the list. We wire commission-free online ordering for restaurants on your own site, white-label delivery at a flat published rate, and a loyalty loop that makes direct the better deal. Hybrid, not cold turkey: let the apps find strangers. Keep the regulars.

Get your free diagnosis See the fee math
The receipts
We built our own engine first $227 first commission → $1.3M/yr renewal residuals 4.9★ across 519 FreedInsure reviews
Where the margin goes

You cooked the order. Who kept the margin?

Six drains we see in delivery P&Ls. Every one of them is arithmetic, not opinion.

Drain 01

The commission math

Under New York City's 2025 fee law, platforms may charge a restaurant up to 43% of an order in total fees — capped at 15% for core delivery, 5% for marketing, 3% for card processing, plus up to 20% for optional "enhanced services." The basic plan a platform must offer to unlock that tier is capped at 23%. Everywhere else, published partner-plan tiers commonly run 15%, 25%, and 30% of the subtotal. Published rates, on food you cooked.

Drain 02

The customer-data problem

Order through a marketplace and that diner is the platform's customer, not yours. You never get the name, the email, the phone, or the order history. You can't invite them back on a slow Tuesday. The platform can — and it decides what they see next. You're paying to build a list you'll never hold.

Drain 03

The $40 break-even

A $50 delivery order on a 25% plan costs $12.50 in fees. White-label delivery runs a published flat rate starting around $7 per delivery, and roughly $10 in New York City once the regulatory fee is added. The flat fee wins the moment a ticket clears about $40 — $10 ÷ 0.25 = $40. Most delivery orders clear it. The math has been sitting in your reports the whole time.

Drain 04

The discovery trap

Quitting the apps cold kills your new-customer flow — discovery is the one thing DoorDash and Uber Eats genuinely deliver. The honest play is hybrid: acquire the stranger on the marketplace, then move the second order and every order after it to your own channel. Pay commission for introductions, not for regulars.

Drain 05

The storefront that can't sell

Your menu and your ordering live inside the platforms, while your own website can't take an order. Every search, every link, every QR code dead-ends in someone else's checkout. The one storefront you fully control is the only one not selling — so even loyal customers route through a toll booth.

Drain 06

No loyalty loop

The regular who orders every week is your cheapest revenue — and on a marketplace you pay full commission on them every single time. No points, no perks, no reason to switch. The customer nobody rewards is the customer everybody re-bills you for. A loyalty loop is the cheapest fix on this page.

What we install

Ordered. Delivered. Captured. Returned.

We built a lead engine and a follow-up cadence for our own company before we wired one for anyone else. Direct ordering is the same machine with a kitchen behind it — four pieces, installed in order, each one feeding the next.

  • Branded ordering that's yoursCommission-free web ordering on your own site — and a branded app when the volume justifies it. You own the storefront, the checkout, and every order that moves through it. No percentage leaves the building.
  • White-label delivery, wired inDoorDash Drive or Uber Direct fulfillment at published flat per-delivery rates instead of a percentage — the white label food delivery app model. Same driver networks, your brand on the order, your name on the bag.
  • The conversion machineQR cards in every bag, order-direct offers, and an owned email and SMS list on a written cadence — the system that moves regulars off the apps one repeat order at a time.
  • The loyalty loopA restaurant loyalty program wired to the direct channel only — because the cheapest order you'll ever get is the regular who came back. Points on your channel, not theirs.
OrderedCommission-free checkout on your own site, your brand end to end
DeliveredWhite-label fulfillment at a flat published rate, not a percentage
CapturedEvery order adds a name to a list you own — email, phone, history
ReturnedLoyalty and cadence bring the regular back direct, not through an app
CountedOrders tracked to source, so the fee math is measured, not guessed
Simulation — how the machine treats an order
19:42:07Order placed — on your own site, commission-free
+0:00:06Customer captured — name, email, phone, on your list
+0:01:31Courier dispatched — flat rate, your name on the bag
+0:02:48Loyalty points logged — next direct order queued

We're not restaurateurs. We're the people who kept the customer.

FreedInsure: founded February 2023 by two people with zero startup capital. First month of commission, $227. It grew to $1.3M a year with roughly three-quarters of the book renewing — and the whole business was built on owning the customer relationship instead of renting it. No marketplace between us and the client. No commission on the repeat. A book of regulars is a book of business. We built one.

Clients left the verdict in public: 4.9 stars across 519 Google reviews. Direct ordering is half the machine — being found in the first place is the other half, which is the restaurant SEO work. The receipts, start to finish, are in the case study.

Free answers first

Read the math before you book the call

The playbook isn't a secret. These are free, and they're most of what a first consult would cover.

Fees

What delivery apps really cost — and the NYC fee change

The published tiers, the 2025 New York City fee law, and the break-even arithmetic — laid out so you can run it on your own tickets.

Read the numbers → Platforms

Toast vs Square: which register your direct channel runs on

Published pricing on both, the built-in delivery dispatch each one ships, and which fits a counter versus a full-service floor.

Read the comparison → Regulars

Your existing customers are the growth plan

The list you own beats the algorithm you rent. How to build the list, and what to send it.

Read the case → Retention

Retention: the revenue hiding in people you already served

Why the second order is worth more than the first, and the cadence that makes it happen on schedule.

Read the breakdown → Getting found

SEO for Staten Island restaurants: the map pack decides Friday night

Before anyone opens an app, they search. The borough-level version — map pack, the PDF menu problem, and the review economy.

Read the borough version → Calculator

Delivery app fee calculator: find your rent number

Put in your monthly app sales, your commission tier and your average ticket. It returns what the apps keep and what a year of it costs you.

Run your own tickets →
Straight answers

Questions owners ask us

It's ordering that lives on your own website instead of a marketplace. The customer orders at your domain, pays you directly, and the order reaches your kitchen the same way an app order does. If delivery is needed, a white-label courier network fulfills it for a flat published fee per delivery instead of a percentage of the ticket. And the customer record — name, email, phone, order history — lands in a list you own, not a platform's database. You keep the margin and you keep the relationship. The second part is worth more than the first.
The numbers are published. Marketplace partner plans run in published tiers commonly around 15%, 25%, and 30% of the order subtotal. Under New York City's 2025 fee law, 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 — and may only charge that enhanced fee if it also offers a basic plan capped at 23% total. Those are published rates and legal caps, not our estimates. The full arithmetic, ticket by ticket, is in what delivery apps really cost.
In most markets, the same drivers. DoorDash Drive and Uber Direct are white-label fulfillment services: your site takes the order, their network delivers it under your brand, and you pay a published flat rate of roughly $7 per delivery at the time of writing — not a percentage of the ticket. And "leave" is the wrong frame. You don't have to quit the marketplace. The honest strategy is hybrid: keep the listing for discovery, where it earns its keep, and move the repeat orders — the profitable ones — onto your own channel.
Not on day one. Web ordering on your own site does the job for most restaurants: nothing to download, it works from a QR code, and search engines can find it. A branded app earns its keep when volume and loyalty justify it — when regulars order every week and a home-screen icon plus a loyalty program would compound the habit. Restaurant app development is part of the offer; it's just not the default. The diagnosis will tell you which side of that line you're on, in writing.
You make direct the better deal, then you tell them — repeatedly, on a schedule. QR cards in every marketplace bag. An order-direct offer worth switching for. Email and SMS capture at checkout, wired to a written cadence so the follow-up actually happens instead of depending on someone remembering. And a restaurant loyalty program that only counts on the direct channel, so every marketplace order is a reminder of the points they didn't earn. Regulars don't switch because you complain about commissions. They switch because you built a channel where they win too.

Run the fee math on your own tickets — free

The free revenue diagnosis pulls your delivery mix apart: what the platforms take now, what a flat rate would take instead, and what a direct channel is worth on your volume. Straight verdict, in writing.

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