Friday night.
The DoorDash tablet won’t stop chirping. You look at the sales total—$1,900. Feels good.
Then the monthly statement lands and you realize almost $570 of it never touched your bank account.
That’s the average reality right now: 27–30 % commission plus the “small” fees that aren’t small.
Do $15,000 a month in third-party delivery and you’re handing over $4,000–$4,500 every thirty days. Money that used to pay for food, labor, or rent.
Here’s the part most owners still don’t realize: you don’t have to kill the apps tomorrow to stop the bleeding. You just have to stop letting them own the entire takeout side of your business.
Three moves that actually put money back in your pocket
- Menu-price optimization The smartest independents quietly mark up their DoorDash and Uber Eats menus 18–24 %. Guests almost never notice because the platform fees get baked in on the customer side. You still show up competitively, but you’re no longer losing money on every burger.
- Shift volume to your own drivers (or hybrid) When you use your own people—even part-time—you drop the per-order platform cut from 30 % to whatever your actual delivery cost is (usually $3–$5). That’s an instant 75 % savings on every order you control.
- Steal phone orders back Every time the phone rings and you recognize the caller, pull up their history, take the order in-house, and run their saved card. Zero commission. Ten-second checkout. Most restaurants we talk to are shocked at how many repeat takeout customers still pick up the phone.
A quick side-by-side on a $50 takeout order says everything:
|
Channel |
Platform takes |
You keep |
|
Straight DoorDash |
~$15 |
$35 |
|
Your driver or phone |
~$4 |
$46 |
Do that on just 40 % of your current volume and the math gets ridiculous fast.
Why most owners haven’t pulled the trigger yet
“It’ll tank my delivery sales.”
That was true in 2019. In 2025 guests are exhausted by $9 “service fees” and $7 “delivery fees” on top of tax and tip. They’ll happily order direct if the experience is simple and the food shows up hot.
How Level makes the shift feel painless
Everything lives in one dashboard:
- Third-party tablets feed right into the same kitchen display
- Different menu prices for different channels (set once, forget it)
- Phone rings → caller ID pops their last three orders and saved card
- Your drivers get a dead-simple app with turn-by-turn and live tracking
No new hardware. No double-entry. No confusing your kitchen.
Already dreaming of cutting the cord completely? We’ve got zero-commission online ordering and QR menus that go straight into the same system (read exactly how that works here, /blog/online-ordering-no-commission).
Ready to run your own numbers?
Pull last month’s DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub statements.
We’ll look at them together—no sales pitch—and show you line-by-line what you’d actually keep with the hybrid approach we just walked through.
Takes fifteen minutes. Even if you never switch, you’ll leave with a plan you can use tomorrow.
Schedule your free delivery profit review:
You built the recipes. You trained the staff.
Time to stop letting an app in California take the profit.