We sell branded apps, so you'd expect this comparison to be rigged. It isn't, and the reason is a selfish one: the honest answer sells better. Marketplaces win two of the five rounds below, and owners who pretend otherwise talk themselves into decisions that lose money. Score each round for your own restaurant as you read.
Round 1: new customer acquisition — marketplace wins
A marketplace puts your food in front of thousands of nearby people who have never heard of you, tonight, and it asks for no marketing skill on your side. Your own app can't do that. Nobody downloads an app for a restaurant they don't know yet. Paying 25–30% on a stranger's first order is roughly what restaurants pay to acquire that customer through ads anyway, so as a discovery channel the marketplace earns its cut.
Round 2: margin on repeat orders — own app wins, by a mile
The marketplace charges the same commission on the fiftieth order from a regular as on the first from a stranger. That's the flaw in the model, and it's where your app takes over. As of mid-2026 the top tiers sit at 30%: DoorDash Premier, and Uber Eats' highest plan after its March 2026 rate increase. Typical US delivery tickets run $25–35, so take the same $30 order from a repeat customer:
$8–11 recovered per repeat order. A regular who orders three times a month is worth roughly $300 more a year through your app. That's one customer. Multiply it across your regulars and you have the whole argument, which we itemized line by line in the real cost of delivery-app fees.
Round 3: conversion — own app, once it's installed
Inside a marketplace you're one of forty listings, and the platform decides who sees you; a typical restaurant converts around 3% there. Your installed app converts up to 35% on our data across 3M+ orders: no competitors on the screen, a saved card, reorder in two taps. The word doing the work is "installed". The app converts brilliantly and acquires nobody, and that split is what the strategy section below is really about.
30 minutes, your real ticket sizes, both channels side by side.
Round 4: customer data and retention tools — own app, uncontested
On a marketplace the customer's name, phone, and order history belong to the platform. You can't push a Friday offer, you can't win back a lapsed regular, you can't even say thank you. Your own channel writes every order into a database you own, and cashback, push notifications, and win-back campaigns run against it at zero cost per message. The marketplace never even competes here.
Round 5: operations and control — own app, with caveats
Your app, your prices (no forced promo funding), your delivery promises, your rules. The caveat is that the delivery is now yours to run too. That's a real operational lift: zones, dispatch, and courier tracking have to work from day one, and platforms differ sharply in how much of it they handle for you. A vendor who sells you an app without logistics has sold you Round 3 and left you to lose Round 5.
When to skip your own app, for now
Selling the honest version means naming the cases where the app loses. Under roughly 100 marketplace orders a month, the fixed costs of an owned channel eat the savings, so stay on the marketplace and revisit at higher volume. A restaurant that's brand new in a market gets more out of marketplace discovery than out of margin for its first six months, because you can't retain customers you haven't acquired yet. And if your operation still can't deliver reliably, with no drivers, no dispatch, and a chaotic kitchen, fix that first: an app that delivers late trains your best customers to distrust your brand instead of the platform's.
The threshold to watch is repeat volume. Once your marketplace statement shows a few hundred orders in a month, with a meaningful share of them from returning customers you can pick out by their item patterns, the scale has tipped. You're paying discovery prices for loyalty, and every month you wait costs you the difference in the chart above.
The verdict: sequence them, don't pick one
The scorecard says marketplaces for discovery, your own channel for everything after the first order. The restaurants that get the economics right run both: full price on the marketplace to fund the commission, better prices plus cashback in their own branded app, and a bag-insert pipeline that moves customers from one to the other every week.
One thing to try this week: pull your marketplace order history and estimate what share comes from repeat customers. You can't see names, but item patterns and timestamps give you a floor, since the same Thursday pad-thai-plus-two-spring-rolls order isn't a new customer. Operators who run this are usually shocked. If even half your marketplace volume is regulars, you're paying acquisition prices for retention on every one of those orders, and that's exactly the leak an own app exists to plug.
Branded app, site, logistics, and marketing — live in ~2 weeks on the platform behind 3M+ orders.