Your guest wants to order takeout. They find you on a marketplace app, order your food, and the app takes up to 30% of the check. For a meal you cooked, from a guest who was looking for you.
The alternative isn't "don't do online ordering." It's putting the ordering on your own site, where no percentage walks out the door.
The math nobody does on day one
Say your restaurant does $5,000 a month in online orders — a modest number for a place with real takeout traffic.
At a 20% platform cut, that's $1,000 a month. $12,000 a year. At 30%, it's $1,500 a month — $18,000 a year, every year, as long as your orders flow through someone else's app.
That number doesn't shrink as you grow. It scales with your success. The busier your ordering gets, the more you pay — which is exactly backwards from how a cost should behave.
The flat fee isn't really flat either
Some ordering platforms pitch "no commission" and charge a monthly fee instead — plus add-on charges for the website, the menu sync, the marketing tools. Read the full invoice before you celebrate. And watch where the orders live: if guests order on the platform's domain or app, the platform owns that relationship, not you.
What ordering on your own site looks like
A guest lands on your domain, sees your menu, and orders right there. No marketplace listing you next to forty competitors. No ads for other restaurants on the page where your guest is trying to pay you.
The part that used to be hard — keeping the online menu in sync with the kitchen — is a solved problem if your point-of-sale is the source. On Remi, you connect your Square account once and your menu syncs automatically: items, prices, modifiers, sold-out flags. 86 the halibut in Square and it's 86'd on your site. Change a price in Square and it changes everywhere. Orders come in with confirmation and order-ready emails that carry your ticket numbers — and you can set the emoji and a one-line note so they sound like your restaurant.
The price of all this
Here's the part that's easy to state: take online orders through Square and your whole Remi site is free — $0/mo. No percentage of your orders. The site is funded by a flat $1 ordering fee per order of $10 or more, paid by the diner and shown at checkout — never a cut of your food. Small checks carry no fee at all.
Your menu, your guest list, your order history — all yours, exportable, on your domain. See it working: order from Volta, our demo restaurant. The feature rundown is in the Square ordering changelog, and the math for your own situation is on the cost page.