Most restaurant owners know delivery apps are expensive. They’ve seen the commission rates in their contracts. They’ve felt it when they look at their end-of-month numbers. But very few have actually sat down and done the full calculation — the real annual number, across all platforms, including the fees that aren’t called commissions.
We did it for you. We pulled the data from 500 Innowi restaurants across the country, looked at what they were paying before they switched, and put together the clearest breakdown we could find anywhere on the internet.
The number is $34,272. That’s the average amount a US independent restaurant paid to third-party delivery platforms in a single year. Here’s how we got there.
The breakdown: where every dollar goes
Let’s start with a restaurant doing $25,000 per month in total sales. That’s a modest number — a typical fast casual or family-owned restaurant in most US cities. Of that, let’s say $8,000 comes through delivery apps. That’s a 32% delivery mix, which is actually lower than the national average post-pandemic.
