Delivery apps brought you new customers once. Now they charge you rent on the customers you already own. Every order that arrives through an aggregator costs you 20–30% of the ticket — before you pay for ingredients, labor, and packaging.
The math nobody shows you
Take your average monthly delivery orders and multiply by your average order value, then apply the commission rate on your aggregator contract. Here is what it looks like at a typical 25% commission and a $35 average order value:
| Delivery orders / month | Revenue via aggregator | Commission lost / month | Lost per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 400 | $14,000 | $3,500 | $42,000 |
| 800 | $28,000 | $7,000 | $84,000 |
| 1,500 | $52,500 | $13,125 | $157,500 |
If you do 800 delivery orders a month, the apps are taking roughly $84,000 a year out of your business. That is a full-time staff member. Or two. Or your entire marketing budget, twice over.
What are you actually paying for?
Aggregators justify the cut with three things: marketplace discovery, logistics, and payment processing. But be honest about which of those you still need:
- ✓ Discovery — useful for tourists passing through. Useless for the regular who orders every Friday and found you years ago.
- ✓ Logistics — if you already run your own drivers or focus on dine-in and pickup, you are paying for riders you never see.
- ✓ Payments — card processing costs 1.5–3%. You are paying 20–30% for something that costs ten times less.
The direct-order alternative: WhatsApp
MezaTab turns WhatsApp into your own ordering channel. The guest scans a QR code at the table or messages your number from a post, story, or Google listing. An AI waiter takes the order in their language, handles modifiers, sends a payment link (card, Apple Pay, M-Pesa, MTN, and more), and drops a clean ticket in your kitchen.
Break-even check: MezaTab is a flat $20/week. At a $35 AOV, that is covered by roughly seven orders a week — everything after that is margin the aggregators used to keep.
Keep the regulars, lose the middleman
You do not have to quit aggregators cold turkey. Most venues start by moving their existing regulars to WhatsApp: same guests, same orders, zero commission. The aggregator becomes one acquisition channel among several instead of the default way your best customers order.
Every month you wait costs exactly what the calculator says it does. Run your numbers, then decide.
Ready to make this yours?
MezaTab is $20/week flat — no commissions, no hardware, no app downloads. Most venues go live in under a week.
Get your custom commission-savings estimate + a 10-minute demo →