Ask five vendors what an online ordering system costs and you'll hear $49/month, $199/month, "2% per order," "$25,000 to start," and "it depends." All five are telling the truth, just about different products. Which one applies to you comes down to your order volume, not your budget. Here are the four tiers, with the ranges operators report paying.
Tier 1: DIY plugins and form builders — $30–100/month
A WordPress plugin, or a generic store builder bent into a menu. You get a checkout and little else. There's no native app, no delivery logistics, no loyalty, and menu editing that fights you every step. For a bakery taking 5–10 preorders a day, that's plenty. The hidden cost is conversion. These checkouts were built to sell t-shirts, not to feed a hungry person poking at a phone, and the gap shows up as abandoned carts you never get to see.
Tier 2: standard SaaS ordering — $100–400/month
The Squares and ChowNows of the world. A hosted ordering page, a decent checkout, basic loyalty once you climb the plans. The mid-2026 numbers: ChowNow runs $119/month (Hub) up to $298–328 (Premier), flat, with no per-order commission; Owner.com pushes the tier's ceiling at $249/month plus 5% per order, or $499/month flat, plus a 5% guest order-support fee, and you're really paying for its marketing engine. Some vendors charge a flat fee, others take $1–2 per order or a small percentage. Read that line twice, because per-order pricing turns into a commission by stealth as you grow. What you usually don't get: your own branded app in the app stores, courier management, or real marketing automation. Fine for pickup-heavy volume, tight for a delivery operation.
Tier 3: white-label platforms — $300–800/month
This is usually where a delivery restaurant's economics come to rest. A white-label platform ships the whole channel under your brand: iOS and Android apps, an ordering website, courier dispatch and zones, cashback and push marketing, and an admin panel that holds it all together. Dots sits in this tier. Launch is a matter of configuration rather than development, so it takes about two weeks instead of months. Your per-order cost is just payment processing, with no percentage skimmed off by the platform.
Tier 4: custom development — $50,000–150,000+ upfront
Your own codebase, your own roadmap. I sell Tier 3, so take this with the appropriate pinch of salt, but below the level of a large multi-location chain, custom is almost always a mistake. The quote is only the entry fee. Budget 15–20% of the build cost every year for maintenance, and every future feature at agency rates on top. Custom pays off when you have genuinely unusual operations that packaged platforms can't model, plus the scale to spread the cost. There's a fuller decision framework in custom platform vs. SaaS.
Tell us your locations and volume — we'll price the full channel on the call, line by line.
The line items that don't appear in the pricing table
Payment processing sits in every tier at roughly 2.9% + $0.30, so treat it as a constant, though check whether the vendor stacks their own markup on top. At volume, the per-order fees matter far more than the monthly ones: $1.50 an order across 1,000 orders a month comes to $1,500, which dwarfs any subscription. Setup and menu migration runs anywhere from $0 to a few thousand depending on the vendor. App store accounts cost $99/year from Apple and a one-time $25 from Google. Then there are integrations. If the system won't talk to your POS, you pay for it forever in double-entered orders and mistakes, so check the integration list before you look at the price.
Multi-location changes the math faster than you'd think
Everything above is priced for a single location. Add a few more and two things change. Per-location pricing stops making sense first: you want platform pricing, where the second location costs a fraction of the first because it reuses the same app, menu structure, and admin. Ask every vendor for the 1-location and 5-location price side by side, because the shape of that curve tells you who built for growth. The coordination features also stop being nice-to-haves. Shared menus with per-location overrides, delivery zones per branch, one monitoring panel across every kitchen, consolidated reporting. A Tier 2 tool that felt fine for one shop turns into five separate logins and a spreadsheet at five, and operators tend to describe that phase as the moment they went platform-shopping.
Custom development gets a fairer hearing at scale too. $100,000 spread over 40 locations is $2,500 each. That's roughly the honest boundary: chains with unusual operations eventually justify building their own, and everyone below that line is better off renting a platform that ships updates every week.
How to actually compare quotes: cost per order
Divide your total monthly cost (subscription, per-order fees, and processing markup) by the direct orders you expect. A $500/month platform doing 800 orders is $0.63 an order. A "cheap" $99 tool doing 80 orders is $1.24. A 30% marketplace on a $30 average check is $9.00, on every order, forever. That's the column that makes a comparison honest, and it's why the math in our commission-free cost breakdown tips so hard once volume shows up.
Before you sign anything, get each vendor to put the all-in cost at your volume in writing, processing included. The ones who answer cleanly tend to be the ones with clean products.
Apps, website, logistics, and marketing — 3M+ orders processed, launch in ~2 weeks.