Menu pricing
How to price your menu for delivery apps
Copy your dine-in prices onto a delivery app and you hand the platform your margin. The app takes its commission from what the customer pays, so the price that works in your dining room is the wrong price on the app — most restaurants add 25–30% and treat delivery as its own price list. This page shows you how to find your own number: what actually lands in your account per order, what a dish has to cost before it earns anything, and where the money quietly leaks.
Start at plus 25–30%
Almost everyone who sells well on the apps runs a separate delivery price list, and almost everyone lands in the same band: 25 to 30% above the dine-in price. It is not greed, it is arithmetic. The platform charges its commission on the price the customer sees, so the higher that price, the more the platform takes — but your food cost does not move at all. The mark-up is what keeps the gap between them the same size it was in your dining room.
If you are choosing where to start inside that band, start low. A new store has no rating, no order history and no position in search, and the first weeks decide how the app treats you afterwards. Cheap-enough-to-try beats optimally-priced-and-ignored. Raising a price later, once orders are coming in and the rating holds, is a five-minute job. Rescuing a store that never got going is not.
The one thing you cannot do is run the same price in both channels and hope it averages out. A dish that earns you three euros in the room can earn nothing on the app, and you will not see it in the dashboard — the dashboard shows revenue, and revenue looks fine right up to the moment you count what arrived in the bank.
Work out your own price
The numbers below start on a plain example — a €9.50 burger — but they are yours to change. Put in your own dine-in price, your own commission rate from your own invoice, and what the dish actually costs you with the box it goes out in.
Your dish
Most restaurants sit between 25 and 30.
Take it off your own invoice, not off the published price list — they are rarely the same.
Share of revenue you spend on in-app ads. Put 0 if you do not advertise.
The box, the lid, the bag and the napkin count. They usually add 40–60 cents.
Taken off what is left after commission and ads. This is the harsh version: our own fee is charged only on growth, so on your existing orders it would be zero.
Break-even price: €5.56. Below that the dish earns nothing. That is your food cost times 1.59 — the multiplier is simply one divided by what reaches you per euro.
Illustrative until you put your own numbers in. Commission and ad share differ per restaurant, per platform and per country.
The check from below
The mark-up tells you where to start. It does not tell you whether the dish is worth selling at all. For that, work from the other end — from what the food costs you.
Whatever reaches you per euro, flip it upside down and you get a multiplier. In the example above, roughly 63 cents of every euro comes back to you, so the multiplier is about 1.59: your food cost times 1.59 is the price at which the dish earns exactly nothing. Everything above that line is yours. Add an agency fee on top and the multiplier climbs — the calculator recalculates it as you type, so you never have to remember a number that only holds for one set of assumptions.
Now run your menu through it. If a dish priced at "dine-in plus 30%" comes out below its break-even line, that dish does not belong on delivery — not at that price, and possibly not at all. Either it gets a higher delivery price, or it goes into a combo where something cheaper carries it, or you leave it in the dining room where it works.
Packaging, the quiet one
Forty cents for a box. Fifteen for the lid. A bag, a napkin, a sauce cup. Nobody prices packaging into a dish because individually it is nothing — and then three hundred orders go out in a month and it is a hundred and eighty euros that never appeared in any calculation.
Put it in the food cost. Not as an estimate for the whole menu, but per dish: a burger in a clamshell and a soup in a sealed tub are not the same money. This is the single most common gap between what a restaurant thinks it earns on delivery and what it actually earns.
Build combos before you launch
A combo does two things at once. It lifts the average order — which is the cleanest way to grow on an app, because the platform's commission does not care how many items are in the basket. And it gives you somewhere to hide margin: pair a dish with a low food cost against one with a high one, and the customer reads the set as good value while the set as a whole earns properly.
Design three to five of them before you go live, not after. Main plus side plus drink. A set for two. A lunch. They are also easier to promote than single items, because a combo has an obvious "instead of" price and single dishes do not.
Leave room for discounts
Here is the part that catches people out. When you run a promotion on a platform, the discount comes off your price, not off the platform's commission. Two-for-one means you hand over a second dish and the platform still charges its share of the whole basket.
So if you already know which dishes you will put into promotions — and on some apps you will not get moving without them — those dishes need a buffer built in from day one. Ten to fifteen per cent on top of the normal delivery price, on those items only, not across the menu. Decide the list in advance. Discounting a dish that was priced with no room in it is how a busy month ends up worse than a quiet one.
Open the app and look around
Before you sign off the price list, open the app as a customer and look at three to five places near you serving your kind of food. You are not copying them. You are checking that you have not landed somewhere strange — twice the price of everyone around you, or so far below that customers assume something is wrong with the food.
Prices in your area move, and a list that made sense in spring can be off by autumn. Check it a couple of times a year, and after any change in your own costs.
Questions people ask
How much should I add to my dine-in price for delivery?
Most restaurants add 25 to 30%. The reason is that the platform charges its commission on the price the customer pays, while your food cost stays the same, so without a mark-up the commission comes straight out of your margin. Start at the lower end of the band when the store is new: a rating and an order history are worth more in the first weeks than a few cents per dish.
How do I know if a dish is worth selling on delivery?
Work out what reaches you from each euro after commission and advertising, then divide one by that figure. That gives you a multiplier. Your food cost with packaging times the multiplier is the price at which the dish earns exactly nothing. If your planned delivery price is below that line, the dish does not work on the app at that price.
Should packaging go into the food cost?
Yes, per dish rather than as a menu-wide average. A box, lid, bag and napkin usually add 40 to 60 cents, which looks like nothing on one order and turns into real money across a few hundred. Leaving it out is the most common reason a delivery menu looks profitable on paper and is not.
Who pays for a discount on a delivery platform?
You do. The discount comes off your price, not off the platform's commission, and the platform still charges its share of the basket. That is why dishes you intend to promote need an extra 10 to 15% built into their price from the start — on those items only, not across the whole menu.
Is the commission rate on the platform's price list the one I pay?
Usually not. The published rate is a starting expectation; the rate on your own statement is the outcome of your contract and it differs by restaurant, by service level and by country. Always take the figure from your own invoice before you use it in any pricing calculation.
Do combos actually help, or do they just cut margin?
They help when they are designed rather than assembled from leftovers. A combo raises the average order, and the platform's commission is charged on the basket regardless of how many items are in it, so a larger basket carries its costs better. It also lets you pair a low food cost dish with a higher one so the set earns properly while still reading as good value.
What is behind the numbers here
- The worked example
- A €9.50 dine-in price, a 30% mark-up, a 30% commission, 7% of revenue on advertising and €3.50 of food cost including packaging. These are round numbers chosen to make the arithmetic legible, not measurements of any restaurant. Every one of them is an input you can change.
- What we do not publish
- No commission rate, contract term or client figure of any named platform appears on this page. Those terms are set per restaurant and are commercially confidential, so any figure printed here would be wrong for most readers.
- What the margin figure is not
- The margin shown by the calculator is what is left after commission, advertising, any agency fee and the cost of the food with its packaging. It is before labour, rent, energy and tax. It is a dish-level check, not a profit statement.
- The agency line
- The optional agency fee is applied to every order, which is the harsh case. Our own agreement charges a share of growth only, so on the orders a restaurant already had before us the figure would be zero. We have kept the harsh version in the calculator so the check errs on the safe side.
Or hand the whole thing to us
Everything on this page is work — pulling the real commission off your invoices, running every dish against its break-even line, checking what the places around you charge, rebuilding the menu and the combos, then keeping the prices honest as your costs move. Most kitchens do not have an evening a week to spare for it.
So we do it. We work inside your own accounts, with read-only access to start: we build the listing, upload the menu, write the descriptions, set the mark-ups dish by dish, put the combos together and watch what your competitors are charging. Your side of it is the kitchen.
And you are not paying for effort — we are paid a share of the growth we bring, measured against your own numbers from before we started. No growth, no invoice.
Leave a request and we will look at your accounts and come back with what we would change and what it is worth. Free, and nothing moves in your accounts until you say so.