How does using SaaS tools like ChowNow impact the unit economics of restaurants compared to paying for each order via third-party delivery platforms?

I can speak to what we see and what our pricing comes out to be.

First, on the delivery apps—there are three or four different companies that have nearly identical business models and pricing —restaurants by and large are not happy with them because they are not created to benefit the restaurants themselves. When you know the thin margins of the restaurant industry, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for these restaurants to give up 30% plus of every single order to somebody else. In many cases, the restaurants are not really making any money. 

When you layer on the fact that these large delivery app companies have all signaled that they're about to raise prices as soon as they can—via teaming up together and acting as one legal group to sue every city that has put regulations and fee caps on delivery orders in place—that 30% in my view will eventually become 35% and 40% and just continue to tick up. Partly, that’s because they need to, because many of them aren't making much money, and in some cases, they’re losing money.

I think restaurants view it as something that’s expensive today and only getting more expensive, so they need an alternative. We are one of the alternatives. We take pride in what we do. While we're not a delivery company, we provide software to help restaurants grow their revenue outside their four walls. We do integrate into various different delivery providers out there. We give restaurants full control over the delivery ordering process. If they want to pass the entire delivery fee off to their diner and not pay anything, they can do that. We don't recommend that because the higher the delivery fee on the consumer, the less the consumer is going to order.

Our recommendation to restaurants is: while you can push the entire fee off, we recommend you cover some of it—but just roughly in the neighborhood of $3 or $4, which equates to less than 10% of their overall orders. 

To your question of how it compares, you pay 30% to name any one of the delivery apps—DoorDash, Grubhub, Seamless. Or, if you use ChowNow or one of our integrated partners, you as a restaurant pick up less than 10% of the cost for deliveries. It's less than a third of what they would pay for GrubHub or any of the other delivery apps out there.