How Much Do Restaurants Lose to DoorDash & Uber Eats Commissions?

If your restaurant lists on DoorDash, Uber Eats, or Grubhub, you already feel it in the P&L: a $40 order does not put $40 in your account. Somewhere between the menu price and your bank deposit, a large slice disappears. This guide breaks down exactly what third-party delivery commission fees cost, where the money actually goes, and what operators can do to keep more of every sale.

What are third-party delivery commission fees?

A commission fee is the percentage a delivery marketplace takes from each order it routes to you. In exchange, the platform lists your menu, processes the payment, and dispatches a driver. The rate is not small — across the major U.S. platforms, commissions typically run 15% to 30% per order, depending on the service tier you sign up for.

The tiers are the catch. A lower-commission plan (often around 15%) usually buries you further down in search results and strips away delivery-radius and marketing perks. The “premium” plan that actually makes you visible to hungry customers is where the 25-30% rates live. In practice, many restaurants pay near the top of that range simply to get seen.

How much do you actually lose per order?

The easiest way to feel the impact is to run the math on a single ticket. Here is what a typical order looks like at each end of the commission range, before you have paid for a single ingredient or an hour of labor:

• $25 order at 15%: the platform keeps $3.75 and you keep $21.25.
• $25 order at 30%: the platform keeps $7.50 and you keep $17.50.
• $50 order at 15%: the platform keeps $7.50 and you keep $42.50.
• $50 order at 30%: the platform keeps $15.00 and you keep $35.00.

Now stack a full week on top of that. A restaurant doing $8,000 a week in third-party delivery at a 25% blended rate is handing over roughly $2,000 every week — on the order of $100,000 a year — just in commissions. That is before food cost, packaging, and the labor to make the food.

The hidden costs beyond the headline commission

The commission percentage is the number everyone quotes, but it is rarely the whole bill. When you audit a delivery statement line by line, the real leakage usually includes several extras:

• Marketing and promoted-listing fees — pay-to-play placement that adds another percentage on top of commission to stay visible.
• Promotions and discounts — “free delivery” or BOGO campaigns are often funded partly or fully by the restaurant, not the platform.
• Refund and error liability — a missing item or a cold delivery can be charged back to you, even when the driver, not the kitchen, caused it.
• Payment processing — sometimes bundled into the commission, sometimes billed separately.
• Lost customer data — the guest belongs to the platform. You rarely get the name, email, or order history you would need to bring them back directly.

That last one is the quiet killer. You are not just renting a delivery driver — you are renting your own customer, and the meter never stops.

Why a 20-30% cut is so dangerous

Full-service and fast-casual restaurants typically operate on thin net margins — often in the single digits, roughly 3% to 6% after everything is paid. A commission that takes 20% to 30% off the top does not shave that margin; on delivery orders it can erase it entirely, or push the ticket into a loss.

Many operators respond by raising menu prices on the delivery apps to protect the margin. That works to a point, but it also makes your brand look more expensive than it is and trains customers to see you as a pricey option — inside a marketplace where a cheaper competitor is one tap away.

What operators can do to keep more

The goal is not to quit the marketplaces cold. For a first-time guest who is scrolling an app, they are a genuine discovery channel. The smarter play is to treat third-party platforms as acquisition and then own the relationship so repeat orders never pay commission again.

• Own a direct ordering channel. A commission-free online ordering page on your own domain means repeat customers order from you, not through a middleman taking a quarter of the ticket.
• Convert marketplace guests into regulars. Use inserts, receipts, and loyalty to move that first-time app customer to your direct channel for order number two.
• Lift in-house average order value. Every order you capture through your own kiosk, app, or site is one where the full margin stays with you — and where upsell tools tend to grow the ticket.
• Keep your customer data. Names, order history, and contact info let you market for the cost of an email instead of a 30% commission.

Where INFI fits

This is the exact problem INFI is built to solve. INFI is the restaurant growth platform — your POS runs the register, INFI runs your growth. It layers on top of the POS you already run (Square, Toast, Clover, Lightspeed, and more) and gives you the direct channels the marketplaces charge you to rent. Commission-free online ordering lets repeat guests order straight from your brand, so that 15-30% cut stops eating every ticket.

From there, the same platform helps you grow the orders you own. Self-ordering kiosks typically lift average order value by roughly 15-30% through consistent upsells, and INFI's own customers have seen real gains — PJ's Coffee reported a 45% higher average order value and Juice Press 15% more per order after adopting INFI ordering. And GROW and loyalty tools turn a one-time marketplace guest into a regular who comes back through a channel you control, not one that bills you commission.

More than 1,800 restaurants use INFI to keep their margins and their customers. If third-party commissions are quietly draining your P&L, see what owning the relationship looks like — Book a Demo and we will map out how much you could keep.