Top 5 Alternatives to Just Eat for Restaurants
The real cost of Just Eat
Just Eat is one of the biggest delivery marketplaces in the UK, and it sends a restaurant orders it would struggle to find on its own. It's also, for anyone who leans on it heavily, one of the biggest lines in the P&L.
What you pay depends on your contract, your location and whether Just Eat's couriers deliver the food or yours do. With Just Eat's delivery service, commission can reach 20-30%. Restaurants using their own drivers have historically paid a lower flat fee per order, but those terms have changed over the years, so read what your current contract says rather than what you remember signing.
Then there's the customer. Just Eat keeps the relationship. You can't email the people who order from you through the app, you can't send them a loyalty offer, and you can't run a campaign to win back the ones who stopped ordering. The person who gets your food every Friday is Just Eat's customer, not yours.
Five alternatives for UK and Irish restaurants follow. The first one removes commission altogether.
1. Flipdish - Direct Online Ordering
Every other option on this list means renting access to someone else's customers. Flipdish is the one where you own the channel.
Flipdish online ordering is a direct ordering platform built for restaurants, takeaways and food operators in the UK and Ireland. You pay a flat monthly fee instead of commission, so an order placed through your Flipdish website or app stays in your margin.
Take a £20 order. On Just Eat at 25% commission the restaurant gets £15. Through a Flipdish-powered direct site it gets £20, less a small slice of the monthly subscription. Now say you take 100 orders a week at that value. At 25% that's £500 a week in commission, or £26,000 over a year. Even if only a third of those orders move to your own channel, you're looking at several thousand pounds that stay in the till.
Here's what you get with it that Just Eat won't give you:
- Your own branded ordering site and mobile app. Customers see your name and your photos, not your menu sitting next to 50 competitors.
- Every direct order comes with a customer email address and an order history, and both belong to you. You can message those customers again without paying Just Eat for the privilege.
- Loyalty programmes. Points or rewards that only work on your own channel give regulars a practical reason to skip the marketplace.
- Flipdish marketing tools send SMS and email campaigns to past customers, with automatic triggers for lapsed customers and seasonal offers.
- AI phone ordering. Phone orders are taken automatically and go into the same kitchen system as online orders, so nobody has to answer the phone and key them in.
- Direct, phone, counter and marketplace orders all land in the same Flipdish POS and kitchen screen.
- Self-service kiosks take the branded ordering experience into the restaurant itself, and built-in upsell prompts push up the average order value.
No per-order cost and customer data you own is why Flipdish comes first here. If you want a view that isn't from a vendor, restauranttech.co.uk is worth reading alongside the vendor sites.
2. Uber Eats
Uber Eats charges commission the same way Just Eat and Deliveroo do. Swapping one for the other doesn't improve your margin on a single order. You just change who you pay.
Where it makes sense is as an addition. In big UK cities Uber Eats reaches a different crowd, often a younger one, and listing on both platforms tends to add orders rather than split the same ones between two apps.
The cost is admin. Two menus to keep up to date, two tablets beeping in the kitchen, two sets of commission invoices to reconcile. Flipdish order management pulls Just Eat and Uber Eats orders into the same kitchen view as your direct Flipdish orders, which gets rid of most of that.
It suits restaurants in large cities that want more delivery reach. The commission is comparable to Just Eat's and Uber keeps the customer data.
3. Deliveroo
Deliveroo sits at the premium end. It's strongest in city centres and with casual dining and restaurant menus. Commission is typically 25-35%, which is more than Just Eat's flat fee options.
Adding it to an existing Just Eat listing gets you in front of a different group: urban, spending more per order, and happy to pay a higher delivery fee to get the food quickly. Where Deliveroo is well established, that group is big enough to matter.
The problem is the same as with the others. Deliveroo owns the customer, and you pay on every single order. A £20 order at 25-35% costs you £5 to £7, and nothing about that order helps you get the next one without paying again.
Worth a look for city restaurants that want a premium audience on top of their Just Eat listing. The downsides are commission above Just Eat's flat fee options and no access to customer data.
4. Foodhub
Foodhub is a UK marketplace that charges a flat monthly subscription instead of commission. You pay to be listed and nothing is taken from individual orders.
For a restaurant with steady volume that can add up to real savings. The sums are simple. Say the fee were £100 a month: that equals 25% commission on £400 of orders, so anything you take beyond £400 a month through the platform costs you less than it would on a percentage deal. Twenty orders at £20 gets you there.
Reach is the catch. Foodhub has far fewer users than Just Eat and doesn't bring the same discovery traffic, especially in areas where people haven't heard of it.
It fits established, high-volume takeaways in areas where Foodhub is already well used. In most UK markets it works better as one channel among several than as a replacement for Just Eat.
5. A direct ordering website
Some restaurants build their own ordering setup using a CMS and a third-party ordering plugin. You get complete flexibility, and you also get a lot of work. The website, the ordering system, payment processing, the kitchen link and the marketing all have to be set up and kept running separately, and when something breaks on a Friday night it's your problem.
The practical version is a purpose-built platform like Flipdish, which gives you the same result (your own branded ordering site, wired straight into the kitchen) without the engineering. A fragile home-built system isn't a real alternative to Just Eat. One that's supported and maintained is.
Building your own makes sense if you have in-house technical people and want full control over the ordering experience. Most operators get a better result for less risk from a platform that already does it.
Why Just Eat's flat fee can still be expensive
Just Eat brought in a flat fee for restaurants that use their own delivery drivers. On a high-value order that's clearly cheaper than 25% commission. On a £40 order, 25% is £10. A flat fee of about 50p is nothing next to that.
Cheap isn't the same as yours, though. Even on the flat fee, you don't get:
- the customer's contact details
- a way to market to them again without paying Just Eat
- loyalty schemes that bring them back to your channel
- the experience of ordering from your own site
The case for a direct channel isn't only the cost per order. A customer who orders twice a month for two years is worth far more than the margin on any single delivery, and on a marketplace you never get to hold onto that customer.
How to migrate customers from Just Eat to direct ordering
Treat Just Eat as a way of finding customers, not as the permanent home for your delivery business. The aim is to get the second and third order onto your own channel.
Put a card in every Just Eat bag offering a discount on the first direct order. It costs pennies to print, and over time it moves a fair share of your repeat customers across. Make the offer specific, such as a free side or £3 off, and put the web address or a QR code on it so nobody has to search for you.
Use QR codes everywhere else too: on the counter, on tables, on menus and on takeaway bags. People scan them while they're waiting for food, which is when they're thinking about the next order.
Look at your prices. Plenty of restaurants mark up their Just Eat menu to cover commission. If your Flipdish site charges less for the same food, customers will notice.
Give people a reason to stay. Points, stamps or rewards that only exist on your direct channel mean a regular who switches isn't giving anything up.
Once customers are ordering through your Flipdish-powered site, automated loyalty and marketing tools look after the relationship. They run re-engagement campaigns that nudge people back to your channel when they start drifting to the marketplace.
Cost comparison at scale
| Platform | Commission on £20 order | Annual cost estimate on 5,000 orders |
|---|---|---|
| Just Eat (25% commission) | £5 | £25,000 |
| Just Eat (flat fee ~£0.50) | £0.50 | £2,500 |
| Deliveroo | £5-£7 | £25,000-£35,000 |
| Uber Eats | £4-£6 | £20,000-£30,000 |
| Flipdish | £0 per order | Monthly subscription only |
Estimates based on publicly available commission ranges. Verify your specific contract rates.
The flat fee row looks great, and for restaurants that qualify it is. The percentage-based rows all run to five figures a year on 5,000 orders.
The bottom line
Just Eat does a real job for restaurant discovery, and most UK operators aren't wrong to keep a listing. The trouble starts when most of your orders come through a platform you don't control. Your margins and your customer list are both in someone else's hands.
Flipdish gives you your own customers, data, brand and margins. You can start the conversation at www.flipdish.com.
