u/rajbhargav752

So a friend of mine runs a small cafe. We were looking at his delivery numbers the other day and honestly, it’s just crazy.

He’s doing around ₹2 Lakhs a month online, but giving away almost ₹80,000 to the big platforms in cuts and visibility charges.

But here's the part that really got us: most of those orders were going to people living just 2 or 3 kilometers away. Literally down the street. He was paying a massive tax just to send food to his own neighbors.

So we decided to just try something else for the local orders under 3km. We completely stopped relying on the apps for them.

To get the word out, we just posted some reels and stories, ran a few super basic local ads for the neighborhood, and gave people a direct WhatsApp link to order from.

For the delivery part, we got a couple of local guys we already knew from the area and gave them a super basic app we put together. Whenever a WhatsApp order comes in, it just pings their phone, they accept it, and they know where to go.

For the ₹30 delivery fee, we just split it. The customer pays ₹15, the cafe pays ₹15. If the bill is over ₹400, the cafe just covers the whole ₹30 because there's enough margin anyway.

His margins changed literally overnight. The neighborhood just got used to seeing the stories and ordering direct via WhatsApp, the platform tax went down to zero for local orders, and the kitchen staff isn't stressing out because the riders just manage themselves on their phones.

If you run a kitchen, what’s the biggest operational headache stopping you from doing this? Drop your current setup below, I just want to see how others are handling this.

Edit: A lot of folks are asking how to do this, so I dropped a link to our F&B Founders Club WhatsApp group in the comments below!

Just looking at the math for a small cafe or cloud kitchen, and it honestly feels completely broken.

Let’s say you do around ₹2 Lakhs a month in online orders. By the time you pay the 35% commission and add the extra money you have to spend on ads just to show up on the app feed, you are easily losing ₹70,000 to ₹80,000 a month.

Think about that. You are paying eighty thousand rupees every single month just to deliver food to people who live less than 4 or 5 kilometers away from you. They are literally your neighbors.

What if we just stopped renting our own customers?

What if we took a tiny slice of that money—say ₹10,000 to ₹15,000—and spent it on simple Instagram ads targeting just our own colony or neighborhood, and gave them a direct way to order from us?

I know the biggest headache is always: "Who will deliver the food? Managing delivery guys is a nightmare." But what if you just use a dedicated rider app to manage a pool of multiple riders seamlessly?

For the delivery fee, you don’t even have to bear the whole cost. There are a few ways to handle it:

1. You can let the customer pay the full rider fee.

After 4 to 5 months of doing this, the local crowd gets into the habit of ordering directly, and you completely stop paying a permanent tax to giant tech apps.

Has anyone actually tried setting up their own riders and splitting the fees like this? Does the math hold up in the long run, or is managing the riders too much of a practical headache?