What Deliveroo Actually Costs a Chester Takeaway

If you run a takeaway and you're on Deliveroo, Uber Eats or Just Eat, you already know the commission hurts. What's less obvious is how much of your profit it actually takes — because the number that matters isn't the percentage on the invoice, it's what's left at the end.

Here's that sum, done properly, with no sales spin. Some of it will be worse than you thought. One part of it is probably better.

The headline number

UK marketplaces charge independents somewhere between 14% and 35% depending on what you sign up for:

What you're on	Typical rate
Self-delivery — they list you, you deliver	around 14%
Standard full-service — they list you and they deliver	25–30%
The dearer end of full-service	30–35%

Most independents end up on full-service, because most independents don't have a fleet of drivers sitting around. So 25–30% is the realistic number for the average chippy, curry house or pizza place — PayoutLedger puts most independents on Deliveroo at 25–30%, and a 2026 comparison of all three platforms gives the same average, with Deliveroo at 28–35%, Uber Eats at 25–35%, and Just Eat at 14% on your own drivers against 25–30% on theirs.

Note which way that last one cuts. Just Eat's self-delivery rate is the one number in this article that argues against us, and it comes up again at the end.

Why 30% isn't "a 30% cut of your profit"

This is the bit that catches people out. Commission comes off your revenue, but it lands on your margin.

Take a £20 order in a business running a fairly typical 15% net margin. That order makes you £3.

Now put it through a marketplace at 25%. They take £5. Your £3 profit becomes minus £2 before you've accounted for the extra packaging that delivery orders need.

Run it at a healthier margin and it is still brutal. A shop on a 30% net margin makes £6 on that £20 order; the same 25% commission leaves it £1 — a reduction of more than four fifths. You don't need to take anyone's word for this, including ours: put your own margin and your own commission rate in and see what comes out. The arithmetic is the argument.

The uncomfortable version of this: for a lot of takeaways, marketplace orders aren't profitable at all. They're turnover. They keep the fryers busy and the staff paid, and they look like growth on a monthly summary. The margin quietly went somewhere else.

The full monthly picture

Let's take a shop doing 400 orders a month at an average of £25 — £10,000 of orders. Nothing exotic.

Say 60% of them go out for delivery, and their rider does the driving.

On a marketplace at 30%:

Commission	£3,000
Card processing	Not separately billed to you — but see below
Delivery	Their rider, their cost
Total	£3,000 / month

Taking the same orders through your own site:

Platform subscription	£50
Our fee — 8% of the food, capped	£600
Card processing — 1.5% + 20p, paid to Stripe	£241
Your own drivers — 240 deliveries at £4.50	£1,080
Delivery charges you collect and keep	−£708
Total	£1,263 / month

That's £1,737 a month, or about £20,800 a year, that stays in the business.

There's a one-off setup fee on top — from £249 — which covers building your menu, getting you onto Stripe, and sorting the domain. Even counting it, you're still ahead by roughly £20,600 in year one.

That £4.50 is a working figure, not a quoted rate. UK delivery drivers earn somewhere between £9 and £14 an hour before costs, depending on the city, the shift and how busy it is — and we've built the £4.50 off the top of that range: roughly £13 an hour over about three drops, plus fuel.

That's deliberate. The driver is a cost on our side of this comparison, so the cheaper end would make the saving look bigger. Taking the expensive end means the gap we quote is the one that survives you checking it. Yours will differ — a driver already out on a round of phone orders costs you nothing extra at all — which is why the calculator lets you change it.

Look hard at that driver line. It is the biggest number on our side of the table — larger than our fee and the card processing put together — and it is the one most comparisons quietly leave out. A marketplace's 30% pays for their rider. Ours doesn't, because you are not renting somebody else's rider network, and that is precisely why the rest of it costs so much less. But the drop still has to happen, and somebody still has to be paid to make it.

Two things move that sum sharply in your favour:

• If you already run a driver for phone orders, the extra cost is nothing. The round is going out anyway. Most Chester curry houses, pizzerias and Chinese takeaways have delivered their own food for years — for them that £1,080 line is zero, and the saving is nearer £2,800 a month.
• Collection orders have no driver at all. They are the most profitable thing you sell, and your own site is the only place you can properly push them.

And one that doesn't. If you are already on an own-delivery rate — the reduced commission a marketplace charges when you supply the driver, typically around 14% rather than 30% — the gap narrows a long way, and for a small shop it can close entirely. Two reasons: you are comparing against 14% rather than 30%, and you are already keeping the delivery fee, because on that tier the marketplace collects it on your behalf and passes it to you. Moving direct doesn't win you either of those; it wins you the customer list. If that is you, put your real numbers through the calculator before you talk to anybody, us included. Better you find that out now than three months in.

You can run this with your own numbers on our savings calculator — change the order count, the average order, and what your platform actually charges you.

Five things we've deliberately left out

Every one of these would make the marketplace column worse and our gap look bigger. Here's why we haven't counted them.

VAT on their commission. The platforms charge VAT on top of their fee, and a lot of comparison articles add it to the total — which is how a 25% headline gets presented as 30%. If you're VAT-registered — and above £90,000 of turnover you are, unchanged for 2026/27 — you reclaim it. PayoutLedger's guide says the same thing: the VAT on commission is input tax and comes back to you on your return. Counting it as a cost would inflate the saving for most of the people reading this. So we don't.

Their payment processing fee — where our two sources disagree. The 2026 platform comparison lists card processing as included on all three. PayoutLedger's Deliveroo guide reports a separate processing fee of around 2.5% on top of commission, varying by agreement. We can't reconcile those from the outside, so the table above says only what both support — that it isn't a line you're billed for — and the sum counts nothing for it. If your statement does show one, the marketplace column is roughly £250 a month light, which is an error in your favour rather than ours. Your statement beats our table.

Refund clawbacks. When a customer claims for a missing item, the refund comes off your payout — including when it was the rider's doing. It's not in our sum because it's impossible to predict, and it's a real number over a month: PayoutLedger puts the effective deduction on a 25% Deliveroo agreement at over 35% once clawbacks and the rest are counted. (The same two sources disagree about tablet rental too — one says £5–£7 a week, the other says hardware is free — which is roughly how much weight to put on any single write-up of someone else's contract.)

The fees they charge your customer. Delivery fee, service fee, small-order fee. Those don't come out of your pocket, so they're not in the sum above. But they're not nothing: they inflate the price of your food by a few pounds at the checkout, and that suppresses order volume in a way that never shows up on your invoice. Your own site has no service fee, which means the same meal is genuinely cheaper for the customer.

Promotions and sponsored placement. The "20% off" campaigns and the paid position in the listings are usually on top of the headline commission. If you're spending there, add it to the marketplace column yourself.

The part that's better than you think

Here's the bit the anti-Deliveroo pieces skip.

The marketplaces are genuinely good at one thing, and it's a thing that's hard to buy any other way: putting you in front of people who have never heard of you. Someone new to the area opens an app, sees your name, and orders. That's real value, and it is worth paying for.

What it isn't worth paying 30% for is Mrs Hughes on Garden Lane, who's ordered the same haddock and chips every Friday for four years, knows exactly what she wants, and would happily tap a link on your website instead.

You're paying a discovery fee, over and over, for customers who were discovered years ago.

So what's the actual move?

Not "delete the apps". We've written about why quitting the marketplaces tomorrow is usually a mistake — the short version is that you'd be switching off your only new-customer channel to save money on orders you might not keep.

The move is to run both, and shift the repeat business across:

1. Keep the apps for discovery. That's what they're good at.
2. Put your own ordering on your own website, where a repeat order costs you pennies instead of a third of the bill.
3. Give your regulars a reason to switch — and put that reason in the bag with every marketplace order that goes out.

Every order you move across is the same food out of the same kitchen — and on a £25 delivery, about £3.70 more in the till once you have paid your own driver. On a collection order, nearer £5.30.

The best use of the money isn't keeping all of it

Here's the part most people miss, and it's the thing that actually gets customers to switch.

If a direct order leaves you better off, you don't have to keep all of it. You can hand some back and still come out ahead — and now you have a reason for people to order direct that isn't "please do it as a favour to me". Just size the discount against the right number: there is far more room on collection than on a delivery you are paying a driver for.

Take that same £25 order, and put 10% off on your own site:

	On the app at 30%	Direct, full price	Direct, 10% off
Customer pays for the food	£25.00	£25.00	£22.50
...plus delivery	£3–5, theirs	£2.95, yours	£2.95, yours
Commission, our fee and card processing	£7.50	£2.24	£2.06
Your driver	—	£4.50	£4.50
You keep	£17.50	£21.21	£18.89

Worth unpicking that £2.24, because 8% of £25 is £2.00 and the sum doesn't obviously work:

Our fee	£1.50
Card processing, paid to Stripe	62p
Your £50 subscription, over 400 orders	12p
Total	£2.24

The fee is £1.50 rather than £2.00 because the £600 cap has already bitten. This shop sells £10,000 of food a month, and 8% of that would be £800 — so it pays £600, which across 400 orders is £1.50 an order. Its effective rate is 6%, not 8%, and it falls further the more it sells. The collection column works the same way, minus the delivery charge the card is processed on.

You have given the customer £2.50 off and you are still about £1.40 ahead once the driver is paid. Real, but not the number to build a pitch on.

On collection it is a different story. No driver, no delivery charge, nothing to pay anyone for moving the food:

	On the app at 30%	Direct, full price	Direct, 10% off
Customer pays	£25.00	£25.00	£22.50
Your costs	£7.50	£2.20	£2.01
You keep	£17.50	£22.80	£20.49

That is £5.30 better on a full-price collection order, and still £2.99 better after handing the customer 10%. Which is the real lesson: the discount that moves people off the apps is the one you attach to collection.

Meanwhile the customer is not only saving the £2.50 — they are also not paying the app's service fee and delivery fee, so the gap at their end is closer to £6 or £7 on the same meal from the same kitchen.

That's a genuinely better deal for both of you, funded entirely by the commission that used to disappear.

A few ways people spend it:

• A flat 10% off everything ordered direct. Simple, easy to put on a card in the bag, and it beats the app on price every single time.
• Free delivery over £20, where the apps charge for it. Very visible, and it nudges the basket size up.
• A first-order code — £5 off your first direct order. Costs you once, moves a customer permanently.
• Keep the price the same and improve the food. Bigger portions, better packaging, a free can with every large order. Harder to compare on price, and it doesn't train people to wait for a discount.

The one thing worth avoiding: don't put your app prices up to fund the direct discount without thinking it through. Most marketplace agreements have price-parity expectations, and you'll want to check yours. Discounting your own channel is the safe direction to move in — you're not raising anything, you're passing on a saving.

Why we're not the cheapest thing you could buy

You can find ordering software cheaper than this. Some of it is free.

What you're paying for beyond the software is that somebody picks up the phone at eight o'clock on a Friday when the tablet has stopped beeping and there are twelve orders on the board. A system that takes your money and cooks your food is not a thing to leave unattended, and pricing it as though it is would be how it ends up unattended.

So: a real setup fee for real setup work, a monthly fee that pays for someone to answer, and a small percentage on top. It's still a fraction of 30%.

Working it out for yourself

Three numbers, and you have your answer:

• Orders a month. Off your platform dashboard.
• Average order value. Same place.
• What you're actually charged. Check your statement rather than going off memory — a lot of people are on a different tier than they think.

Put them in the calculator. It'll show you what you're paying now, what you'd pay direct, and which plan actually works out cheapest at your volume — including telling you when the free one is the right answer.

If the gap is small, we'll say so. There genuinely are quiet shops where a low-commission tier costs less than any subscription, and we'd rather tell you that than sell you something you don't need.

For most takeaways doing steady repeat trade, it isn't small at all.

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Porkenpence Ltd builds direct ordering systems for restaurants and takeaways in Chester and across the UK. You can try the whole thing — customer, kitchen, driver and all — without signing up for anything.