Free tool
Delivery price calculator
A delivery app charges its commission on the price the customer sees, VAT comes out of the same price, and a discount comes out of your side of it — not the platform’s. So the price that works in your dining room is the wrong price on the app. Put in what a dish costs you and what your platform takes, and this tool works backwards to the shelf price that still leaves the kitchen the profit you asked for — then shows you where every cent of that price goes.
The figures the calculator opens with are approximate, drawn from our practice of running restaurant accounts on delivery platforms. They move from city to city and from platform to platform — commission, advertising and VAT are not the same in Lisbon and in Milan, and they are not the same for two restaurants on the same app. Every one of them is a field you can change. Take the real numbers off your own invoice before you price a menu on this.
The dish
The box, the lid, the bag, the napkin and the sauce cup. Usually 20–60 cents, and usually left out.
The part of your payroll that moves with volume — the hands that actually make this dish — as a share of ingredients and packaging. Rent, utilities and the salaried core of your payroll are deliberately not here: they do not change when one more order goes out. Set this to 0 and the calculator prices on food cost alone.
Of what the dish costs to make. This is the number the calculator solves for — everything else is subtracted before it.
Costs you per dish€3.37
The platform
Off your own invoice, not off a published price list — they are rarely the same, and we do not publish anyone’s.
This is the one figure the calculator will not guess for you. Rates on prepared food and on drinks differ from country to country, a reduced rate on food is not universal, and getting this wrong moves the price more than anything else on the page. The 10% it opens with is a placeholder, not a recommendation.
The whole basket, not this dish. Per-order charges are spread across it.
Payment processing, adjustments, whatever your statement calls them.
Share of revenue you lose to orders that come back. Small, but it is never zero.
Advertising
If your ad report gives you a cost per order, use it directly.
Only affects our fee, which is charged on growth after the advertising you actually paid for. Put 0 if you reclaim it.
Advertising per order€1.25
Promotions
Comes off your price, not off the commission. The platform still charges its share of the full basket.
The discount is averaged over the month, so eight days of −20% weigh a third of what thirty days would.
Charged once per order, so it is spread across the basket, not across this dish alone. Put 0 if your platform does not charge one.
Delivery Lift
Our fee is 15% of the growth, after the platform commission and the extra advertising are taken out of it. On the orders you already had, it is zero — so the answer to “how much does this add to my price” depends on how much of your revenue is new.
Not how much you turn over — how much more you expect to. A restaurant doing €4,000 a month and one doing €40,000 get the same shelf price out of this, because only the ratio of new revenue to total revenue reaches the calculation.
Share of revenue that is new23%
Safety margin
Of the dish cost. Ingredient prices move, and a menu you reprice twice a year needs somewhere for that to go.
Shelf price on the app
€8.65
During the promotion
€6.92
Break-even
€6.65
Below this the dish earns nothing at all.
To the kitchen
€4.38
Out of every order, averaged over the month.
Margin per dish
€1.01
On a dish that costs you €3.37 to make.
Deepest discount
68%
Over the same days, before the dish stops earning.
Leaves the price
€4.27
Discount, VAT, commission, advertising and fees together.
Delivery Lift fee
€0
You are not working with us in this scenario.
Where the price goes
| Per order | € | % |
|---|---|---|
| Shelf price | €8.65 | 100.0% |
| − Discount, averaged over the month | −€0.46 | 5.3% |
| − VAT | −€0.74 | 8.6% |
| − Platform commission | −€2.59 | 30.0% |
| − Advertising | −€0.39 | 4.5% |
| − Promotion fee | −€0.06 | 0.7% |
| − Other platform charges | −€0.02 | 0.2% |
| − Refunds and cancellations | −€0.01 | 0.1% |
| Reaches the kitchen | €4.38 | 50.7% |
| − Ingredients, packaging, labour | −€3.37 | 39.0% |
| Margin on the dish | €1.01 | 11.7% |
Everything here is per dish and per month on average, and it is an estimate rather than an account: the kitchen labour line is an allocation, not a measured cost. It is a pricing check, not a profit statement — rent, utilities, the salaried part of your payroll and income tax all sit below the last line.
How the number is built
Most pricing advice runs forwards: take the dine-in price, add a quarter, hope. This runs backwards. You state what the dish must leave you, and the calculator finds the only price at which it does — because every charge on the way is a share of that price, and a share of an unknown is solved for, not guessed at.
Start from the bottom. Ingredients, packaging and the labour to make it are what the dish costs you. Your target profit is a share of that cost. Together they are what has to survive the trip down from the shelf price.
Now the trip. VAT comes out first — it was never yours. The platform’s commission is charged on the price including VAT, which is why a commission rate always bites harder than it reads. Advertising, the small statement charges and the orders that come back are shares of your net revenue. A promotion takes its discount off your side and adds a fee per order. And if you work with us, our share of the growth comes off what is left.
What survives all of that is the fraction of the shelf price that actually reaches the kitchen. Divide what the dish has to leave you by that fraction and you have the price. That is the whole calculation, and the table on the right is the same arithmetic run in the other direction so you can check it line by line.
Why the discount is averaged
A dish sold at −20% for eight days a month is not a dish at −20%. It is a dish at −20% for roughly a quarter of the month and at full price for the rest, and the price has to be right across both. Putting the full discount into the price would give you a number nobody would order at; ignoring the discount would give you a number that loses money every time the promotion runs.
So the calculator weighs the discount by the days it runs. Change the days and watch the shelf price move — that movement is the true cost of a promotion calendar, and it is the number most kitchens have never seen.
Where our own fee sits in this
We charge 15% of the growth we bring, measured against your own numbers from before we started, and we take the platform commission and the extra advertising out of that growth before the 15% is applied. If a month brings no growth, there is no invoice.
That is why the control above has three states rather than a switch. A restaurant starting from zero on a platform is all growth, so the fee touches the whole order and the price moves the most. A restaurant that expects a third more than it does today has under a quarter of its revenue in scope, so the effect on the shelf price is a few cents. Set it to how you would actually come to us and the number stops being a sales claim and starts being arithmetic you can check.
The calculator asks for the growth and not for the turnover, and that is deliberate: the size of your turnover does not change the answer. Expect a third more, and a quarter of your revenue is new whether the month is €4,000 or €40,000 — and it is that quarter, not the euros, that reaches the price. One number, and it is the number you would actually be negotiating.
Questions people ask
Why is the price higher than dine-in plus 30%?
Because plus 30% is a rule of thumb and this is the actual arithmetic. A mark-up assumes the commission is the only thing taken out. Once VAT, advertising, per-order charges, refunds and an averaged discount are all in the same calculation, the price that leaves the kitchen its target profit is usually above the rule of thumb — and the gap is exactly what the rule of thumb was hiding.
Which commission rate should I put in?
The one on your own statement. Published rates are a starting expectation; what you actually pay is the outcome of your contract and it differs by restaurant, by service level and by country. We do not publish the terms of any platform, so there is nothing here to copy — take the figure from your last invoice.
Why does the calculator ask for the average order and not just the dish?
Because some charges are per order rather than per item. A promotion fee is charged once whether the basket holds one dish or four, so it has to be spread across the basket before it can be attributed to a single dish. Get the average order badly wrong and those per-order lines will be wrong with it.
What does “deepest discount” mean exactly?
At the price the calculator has just given you, running for the same number of days a month, it is the discount depth at which the dish’s profit reaches zero. Anything deeper and the promotion is paid for out of your pocket. It is not a target — it is the wall.
Should kitchen labour really sit inside the dish cost?
It is a judgement call, and the calculator lets you make it either way. Labour is the one cost between food and rent that genuinely moves with volume — cook more dishes and you pay for more hands — so allocating a share of it per dish gives a price closer to reality than food cost alone. It is still an allocation, not a measurement. Rent, utilities and the salaried core of the payroll do not move with one more order, so they stay below the line rather than inside the dish. Set the labour share to 0 and what the calculator shows becomes the plain margin on food and packaging.
It says no price works. What happened?
The charges you entered add up to the whole order or more, so no price can cover them: raising the price raises the commission with it and the gap never closes. In practice it means the commission, the advertising or the discount is set higher than the model can carry. Check them against your invoice — and if they are right, that is a finding about the channel, not about the calculator.
Does anything I type here reach you?
No. The calculation runs in your browser and nothing you enter is sent anywhere or stored. Nothing is loaded from Google or Meta until you choose to accept it in the cookie notice, and even then only the fact that the calculator was used is recorded — never the numbers.
What is behind the numbers here
- Where the default figures come from
- From our practice of running restaurant accounts on delivery platforms. They are typical, not measured: a working example to start from, in the same shape as the numbers a restaurant actually reads off its statements. Every one of them is an input.
- 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. Nothing on this page is attributed to any platform or any client.
- How the fee is modelled
- 15% of growth, with the platform commission and the advertising above your usual level subtracted from the growth before the percentage is applied — the same calculation as in our agreement. The three-state control sets how much of your revenue counts as growth; at “not working with us” the fee is zero and the line disappears from the table.
- What the margin line is not
- It is what is left after the platform, advertising, promotions, refunds, any fee of ours, and the cost of making the dish including its packaging and the labour to cook it. It is before rent, utilities, the salaried part of the payroll and income tax. It is a dish-level check, not a profit statement, and it is not gross profit either — gross profit stops at food and packaging, and this line has the labour allocation taken out of it as well.
- Why labour is inside the dish and rent is not
- Because one moves with the order and the other does not. Cook an extra dish and somebody’s hands are on it; the rent is the same whether you send out two hundred orders in a month or four hundred. A cost that scales with volume can be allocated per dish and still mean something; a cost that does not scale cannot, and putting it there would dress the result up as a full profit statement. The labour figure is an allocation all the same — set it to 0 and the calculator prices on food and packaging alone.
- VAT
- Entered by you, with no preset and no recommendation. Rates on prepared food and on drinks differ from country to country and a reduced rate on food is not universal, so any figure printed here would be wrong for most readers. Take it from your own invoice or confirm it with your accountant.
Or let us price the menu for you
This page prices one dish. A menu is sixty of them, each with its own food cost, its own place in a combo and its own role in the promotion calendar — and the answer changes every time your supplier does. 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 rebuild the listing and the menu, set the price of every dish against its own costs, put the combos together, plan the promotion calendar so the discounts are paid for in advance, and keep the prices honest as your costs move. Your side of it is the kitchen.
And you are not paying for effort — 15% 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.