Commission-free online ordering in Vancouver: what it really costs in 2026

If you run a restaurant in Vancouver, Surrey, Burnaby or anywhere else in the Lower Mainland, you already know the delivery apps take a cut. What most owners have not done is the arithmetic on what that cut is worth over a year, because the number is uncomfortable.

What BC actually allows

British Columbia is the only province with a permanent cap. Under the Food Delivery Service Fee Act, an app can charge a restaurant at most 15% commission on an order, plus up to 5% for other services, for a total of 20%. Elsewhere in Canada there is no cap at all, and 25 to 30% is common.

Twenty percent sounds better than thirty. It is still a fifth of the order.

The $60 order

Take a $60 dinner order through an app at the BC cap. $12 goes to the app before you have paid for the food, the cook or the box it went out in.

Statistics Canada put the sector’s operating margin at 4.1% in 2024. At that margin, $12 of commission is the entire operating profit on about $290 of sales. One app order costs you the profit on five dine-in tables.

Now do it for a year. A restaurant taking $80,000 a month with a fifth of it through the apps pays roughly $3,200 a month in commission at the cap, or about $38,000 a year. That is a full-time wage, paid to a company that has never set foot in your kitchen.

What “commission-free” means, and what it does not

Commission-free online ordering means the order comes through your own website or a code on your table, the payment goes into your own account, and nobody takes a percentage. You still pay card processing, the same as you would on any card at the counter. You still pay for the software. What disappears is the slice.

It does not mean the apps vanish. Most Vancouver restaurants keep one or two for discovery and move their regulars direct. Even moving 40% of app orders to your own channel keeps around $15,000 a year in the example above, and that is a conservative share.

The part most vendors leave out

Taking the order is half the job. If it lands in a system that re-keys it to the kitchen, prints it on a leased terminal and leaves the guest’s details in a marketing tool that never sees the till, you have swapped one kind of leak for another.

The order should hit the kitchen screen the second it is placed, the payment should settle into your account with the tip attached, the guest should earn points without a second app, and the day should close with the numbers already added up. That is what “one system” means, and it is the difference between commission-free ordering that saves money and commission-free ordering that just adds a subscription.

Where to start

Put your own numbers into the calculator on our homepage. It uses only money you already pay, and you can change every assumption. Then send us your menu and we will build a private demo you can open on your phone, no call needed. Restaurants in Vancouver, Surrey and New Westminster already run on it.

Sources: Government of British Columbia, Food Delivery Service Fee Act; Statistics Canada, Food services and drinking places, annual, 2024.