Most venues doing their own delivery pick between two bad options. Pay Uber Eats or DoorDash 15–30% of every order to use their driver network. Or hire a driver outright, and pay their wage through the dead 90 minutes between the lunch rush and the dinner rush, whether an order comes in or not. There’s a third option that fits how a kitchen actually runs: book a driver for the two or three hours you’re actually busy, through an on-demand driver-hire platform, and pay only for that block. Asky can point you to a service that operates in your area — talk to us and we’ll help you work out whether it fits.
Why the two usual options both waste money
The marketplace charges rent on every single sale
A commission isn’t a delivery fee — it’s a cut of the food, the packaging, the labour and the rent, taken before any of your own costs are covered. On a food-cost-heavy menu, that percentage is often close to the entire margin on the order. Volume through the app can look healthy while the profit on it does not.
A full-time driver is a fixed cost against variable demand
Delivery isn’t evenly spread across the day. It spikes at lunch, spikes again at dinner, and is close to zero the rest of the time. A driver on the payroll gets paid for all of it — the rush and the lull. Scheduling around that is either overstaffed at 3pm or understaffed at 7pm, and there’s rarely a version that’s right for both.
The middle option: book the driver, not the shift
On-demand driver-hire platforms let you book a driver for a fixed window — say, 6pm to 8:30pm on a Friday — the same way you’d book a casual for a shift. You pay for the hours booked, not a percentage of each order and not a wage for hours nobody’s ordering.
It moves orders off the marketplace without you having to ask
Once you can fulfil your own delivery at peak, the case for staying on Uber Eats or DoorDash for every order gets a lot weaker. Direct orders through your own QR ordering page — the ones that used to only make sense with a marketplace driver behind them — now have somewhere to go. The marketplace doesn’t disappear; it goes back to being what it’s actually good for, which is discovery, not your primary delivery fleet.
The same driver, back for the same shift, gets better at it
A marketplace driver is a stranger every time — a different person, a different car, no memory of your building’s side entrance or the apartment block that never has parking. A driver booked for the same Friday and Saturday peak week after week learns your streets, your regulars, and which order goes with which building. Route time drops, wrong-address mistakes drop, and the delivery experience starts to look like something you actually control instead of something you outsource to whoever the app assigns.
The saving doesn’t have to be only yours
Because the cost per order is lower than a marketplace commission, there’s room to pass some of it on — a delivery fee that undercuts what the marketplace charges the same customer for the same trip. That’s a second reason for a customer to order direct beyond “the restaurant keeps more of the money”: it’s cheaper for them too.
See what commission is actually costing you
Plug in your own numbers
This is what's going to marketplace commission on your own numbers today — not a promise of what a booked driver saves, since that depends on rates where you are. Asky can help you find out.
Running it through Asky
None of this needs a separate delivery app bolted onto your ordering system. Direct orders — from your own QR ordering page — land on one delivery panel showing every active order, its driver, and its ETA. The booked driver gets their own app: queue, route, customer notes and proof of delivery, same as if they were an in-house employee. A dynamic map batches nearby drops so one booked driver covers more ground in the same window instead of crossing town twice for orders that were three streets apart. And because every one of these is a direct order, it builds a customer profile — order history, address, preferences — the same data a marketplace order never hands back.
How to try it without overhauling anything
- Find your actual peak, not your assumed one. Pull two weeks of order timestamps and find the real 2–3 hour window, not just “dinner.”
- Ask Asky what’s available near you. Driver-hire options vary a lot by city and even by suburb — tell us your peak window and delivery radius, and we’ll point you to what operates in your area.
- Trial one shift. Cover a single peak window with a hired driver and run your own direct orders through it, marketplace orders untouched.
- Compare the real numbers. The flat rate for that block against what the marketplace commission would have taken from the same orders, plus what a full shift on payroll would have cost across the whole day.
- Extend the window that actually pays off. If Friday and Saturday dinner clear the bar, add Thursday. Leave the marketplace running everywhere else until the case to extend further is obvious from your own numbers, not a guess.
The number worth tracking isn’t the driver-hire rate. It’s what share of your delivery volume you’re fulfilling yourself, at your own margin, with your own customer data attached to it — versus how much of it you’re still paying a marketplace to hand back to you as a stranger’s first-time order, every time.