A studio does not sell ordering software. It sells the difference between 13% of revenue and $85 a month — and keeps a healthy slice of that difference. Here is the arithmetic to walk a client through.
The hardest part of selling a restaurant its own ordering page is not the build. It is the first meeting, where the owner has already decided that the marketplace is annoying but necessary and that your proposal is a nice-to-have.
You do not win that meeting with a feature list. Nobody has ever bought an ordering system because it supports pre-orders. You win it with one subtraction, done out loud, with their numbers.
Ask for one figure: monthly order volume through the marketplace. Owners know this number, or can find it in two clicks.
Say it is $18,000 a month — one location, steady trade, nothing exceptional. At 13% commission, that restaurant is paying $2,340 a month. Marketplaces in this market commonly charge between 13% and 30%, plus per-order fees on top, so treat 13% as the friendly end.
Now the platform side of your proposal. Pro is $20 a month and includes $5,000 of order volume; above that it is 0.5%. For a single restaurant at $18,000:
$20.00 Pro plan, flat
$65.00 0.5% on the $13,000 above the included $5,000
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$85.00 platform cost for the month$2,340 against $85. That is $2,255 a month sitting on the table, and the entire commercial conversation is about who ends up with it.
I have used one restaurant deliberately, because a studio running several has a different denominator and you should get that number from the calculator rather than from my assumptions about your portfolio.
This is the part that makes it a business rather than a favour.
You are not obliged to pass the whole $2,255 to the restaurant. You built the thing, you maintain it, you answer the phone when the printer stops printing. A retainer that captures a meaningful share of that saving is not a markup you have to apologise for — it is a fraction of a cost the client was already paying without complaint, in exchange for work that is visibly yours.
The pitch is symmetric and it is honest: the restaurant pays less than it does today, you get recurring revenue that is not tied to your hours, and the platform bill underneath is a small, predictable line item. Nobody in that arrangement is being squeezed, which is why it survives the second year.
What makes it scale is that your cost side barely moves. Pro covers unlimited restaurants — the second, fifth and twentieth client sit on the same $20 base, and only the metered volume grows with them. Your revenue is roughly linear in clients; your platform cost is close to flat plus a small variable. That gap is the whole business model, and it is why this works as a practice rather than a series of one-off projects.
If you skip this part, a sharp owner will raise it and you will look like you were hiding it.
A marketplace commission buys demand. Someone opens an app hungry and undecided, and the marketplace chooses which restaurants they see. That is real, and your ordering page does not replicate it. Nobody navigates directly to a restaurant they have never heard of.
The 0.5% buys infrastructure: storefront, order pipeline, live kitchen sync, receipts, image processing, certificates. It brings in zero diners on its own.
So the argument is not “marketplaces are theft.” It is narrower and much harder to rebut: a restaurant with an established local trade is paying a discovery fee on customers it already had. The regular who orders the same pizza every Thursday did not need discovering. They needed a link.
That is the position to take into the meeting. Keep the marketplace for the diners it genuinely finds. Stop paying 13–30% on the ones who would have phoned anyway. Framed that way you are not asking the owner to bet the business on you — you are asking them to stop overpaying on the safest segment of their revenue, which is a much smaller ask and a much easier yes.
It also means you should walk away from the wrong clients. A brand-new restaurant with no signage, no regulars and no local reputation genuinely needs the marketplace’s demand, and selling it a standalone ordering page is selling a cost cut that arrives as a revenue cut. Say so. You will lose one small deal and gain a reputation that closes larger ones.
There is a design decision in that 0.5% that affects your margin directly, so it is worth knowing why it is not a per-order fee.
A flat fee per order is easy to forecast but regressive: a €9 lunch bowl and a €70 family order cost almost the same to process, so a per-order fee takes a much bigger bite out of the cheap one. It penalises high-volume, low-ticket restaurants, which is most of the market you will be selling into.
Charging a small percentage on volume above an allowance behaves better for both of you. A client’s quiet January costs $20 and nothing else, so your platform bill contracts when their revenue does and your retainer does not have to absorb the difference. The rest of the metered surface works the same way — allowances sized for normal use, then $0.75 a month for the second custom domain onward, $0.20 per GB-month of image storage past the first, $3 per 100,000 storefront views past the first 100,000. Small, disclosed, and none of it attached to an order.
The line item wins the first meeting. Ownership is what stops the client drifting back.
On a marketplace, the diner belongs to the marketplace. The restaurant does not get the email address, cannot mail them next month, and cannot see reviews except through someone else’s interface. When the ranking algorithm changes, their Tuesday changes with it and there is no appeal.
What you are installing inverts that. The domain is the restaurant’s. The Stripe account is the restaurant’s, with its own keys, so money lands there directly and nobody is waiting on a third party’s payout schedule. Confirmations come from the restaurant’s own sender, and a diner who replies reaches the restaurant.
That is the thing you can point at in the renewal conversation, and it is worth more than the monthly saving: after a year on their own domain, with their own list and their own payment relationship, the client owns an asset. They did not own anything before. You built that, and it is quite hard to argue it was not worth a retainer.
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