The Fee You See Every Week, and the One You Don’t
Delivery apps bring orders a small kitchen would never get on its own. Nobody serious is suggesting you switch them off. But the commission arrives as a smaller payout, not as a bill, so it is easy to know roughly and hard to know exactly.
So, as with the 2% cut, we worked it out.
The rates below are examples, not quotes. Commission depends on your contract, your city, and whether you pay for extra visibility, so take your own rate off your last payout statement before you read the table.
The Maths
Say a kitchen does ₹3,00,000 a month in delivery orders. The platform keeps its commission, and GST at 18% is charged on that commission too. That GST is on the platform’s service to you. It is separate from the 5% GST on the food, which the platform collects from the diner and pays itself.
At 25%, more than ₹10 lakh a year leaves before a single supplier is paid. That is a cook’s salary several times over.
Not All of Those Orders Need the App
Some of those diners found you on the app. Others are your regulars, people who already know your number and would happily order directly if it were as easy.
Move one in five of those orders, ₹60,000 a month, to your own menu at a 25% commission and you keep ₹17,700 a month, or ₹2,12,400 a year. Nothing about the food changes. The order just comes in by a different door.
Three things make that door easy to use:
- A menu link they can open on their phone, with photos, veg marks and prices, so ordering direct is no harder than the app.
- Payment by UPI to your own UPI ID, for the exact amount, so there is no cash to count and no one is waiting on a callback.
- A card in every delivery bag with the link or a QR code. The diner holding your food is the one most likely to order again.
Know Your Real Number
The table above uses a made-up kitchen. Yours has a real commission rate and a real split between app orders and direct ones, and the only way to see it is to book delivery orders the same way as everything else.
In Tournant, each delivery order is recorded against the platform it came from, with no GST added on your side, since the platform pays the food GST. You set each platform’s commission rate in Settings, and the P&L shows it as its own line, Platform commissions, next to your other costs. Your own menu takes no cut at all: one flat monthly fee, however much comes through it.
When that line is bigger than your rent, you know where to start.