What Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat Really Cost Your Restaurant

Every restaurant owner knows the delivery apps take a cut. What most do not realise is how big that cut actually is once you add everything up, or how much of your own money is quietly walking out of the door every single month.

So let's put real numbers on it. No spin, no sales pitch, just what Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat actually cost a UK restaurant in 2026, and what you can do about it.

The headline commission

Here is where each of the big three sits on their standard full-delivery terms:

• Deliveroo: around 30 to 35 percent of every order
• Uber Eats: around 30 percent of every order
• Just Eat: around 14 to 15 percent of every order

Those are commercial terms, not fixed prices, so your exact number depends on what you negotiated. But most independents are somewhere in that range.

Now the part nobody mentions at sign-up: VAT is charged on top of the commission. On a Deliveroo order the headline 30 percent becomes closer to 36 percent once the VAT on their fee is added. So the real deduction is bigger than the number on the contract.

What that looks like on a real order

Take a simple £15 order on Deliveroo.

• Order value: £15.00
• Commission (35 percent): £5.25
• What you actually keep: £9.75

You made the food, paid for the ingredients, paid your staff to cook it, and you kept £9.75 of a £15 order. Do that on Just Eat instead and you would keep around £12.75. Same food, nearly three pounds' difference, on one small order.

Now multiply it by a month

This is where it stops being a rounding error.

Say you do a modest £8,000 a month through the delivery apps at an average 30 percent commission:

• Monthly commission: £2,400
• Over a year: £28,800

Nearly thirty thousand pounds a year, gone, on order value you generated yourself. And that is before card processing fees and before any one-off costs. Uber Eats, for example, charges a one-off activation fee of around £650 to get set up in the first place.

Push your volume to £15,000 a month and you are handing over £4,500 every month, £54,000 a year, to a middleman for the privilege of taking orders you could have taken yourself.

The costs you do not see on the invoice

The commission is the obvious one. These are the ones that creep up on you:

• VAT on the commission, as above, which pushes 30 percent nearer to 36 percent
• Card and service fees on top of commission
• You do not own the customer. The app owns the relationship, the data, the reorder. When a customer orders your food through Deliveroo, they are Deliveroo's customer, not yours. You cannot email them, text them, or bring them back with an offer.
• You compete inside their marketplace. The app decides who ranks where, and it is not always you.

The alternative: take the orders yourself

None of this means delivery is a bad idea. Ordering food to your door is not going away. The problem is not delivery, it is the percentage of every order you give away forever to take those orders.

The fix is simple in principle: have your own ordering app, where the order comes straight to you and you pay zero commission on it. A flat, predictable cost instead of a cut of everything.

That used to be the preserve of the big chains with big budgets. It is not any more. At Fusion Creative we build independent restaurants their own branded ordering app: customers order, collect or get it delivered, and you keep the full value of every order. It is £249 to set up and £99 a month, with no commission on a single order, ever.

Run the numbers against that £2,400-a-month commission bill and it is not close. A flat £99 a month versus 30 percent of everything you sell.

We break down exactly how the platform works, and the full cost comparison, over on our ordering app page. If you want to see what you would actually keep, that is the place to start.

The takeaway

The delivery apps are convenient, and for reach they have their place. But convenience at 30 to 36 percent of every order, forever, is one of the most expensive things a restaurant can pay for. The moment your delivery volume is meaningful, owning the order rather than renting it becomes the obvious move.

Work out your own monthly commission bill. If it is more than £99, you already know which way the maths points.