Grubhub's co-founder is back, charging $1 where DoorDash takes up to 30%

The founder of Grubhub now sells ordering without the commission

Matt Maloney co-founded Grubhub in 2004 and left in 2021 after its sale ¹². This year he quietly helped start Bites, a pre-seed startup with about 300 restaurants signed up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and his role went public on October 7 ¹. His case: the industry's billions in infrastructure spending are finished, "and yet the pricing has stayed the same" ¹.

Bites charges restaurants a flat $1 per order and diners a fixed $6.99 delivery fee ², sends orders straight into point-of-sale systems through partners such as Toast▲+1.58% — Toast, up 1.58 percent today and Square, and accepts orders placed inside ChatGPT ¹. What the $1 attacks is the take. DoorDash▼−0.37% — DoorDash, down 0.37 percent today publishes merchant plans charging 15%, 25% or 30% of each delivery order↗ ³, the cut behind $4.45 billion of second-quarter revenue on 970 million orders↗ and an $83.1 billion market value on October 20 ⁴.

The numbers show no bend yet, and owners are already moving

The reported numbers show no compression yet. Revenue divided by orders works out to about $4.59 an order in the second quarter, against roughly $4.30 a year earlier on the same arithmetic ⁴⁵. GAAP net income ran $200 million, down 30% on the year, on record revenue ⁴⁵. The shift is showing up owner by owner: Jay Jayaraman, who runs 13 restaurants listed on Bites, estimates his orders have flipped from 80% DoorDash to 65% Bites ¹.

DoorDash's published reply, an August email to Bay Area restaurants↗, warned they might be listed on Bites without consent and that, depending on the state, "such practices could be illegal" ¹. DoorDash spokesperson Lisa Singh said "some restaurant partners raised concerns," and that partners who had opted in needed to do nothing ¹. DoorDash answered a $1 fee with a form letter ¹.

Olo opened a second front on October 20

Olo, whose software already carries 3.5 million orders a day for 800 brands at about 90,000 locations ³⁶, launched a consumer app on October 20↗ with more than 250 brands, no restaurant commissions and a flat 5% diner fee (fee math charted here October 21↗) ³⁷. In a New Jersey price check on October 21, one Five Guys basket totaled $20.37 direct, $20.81 on Olo, $22.26 on DoorDash and $23.29 on Uber▲+0.98% — Uber, up 0.98 percent today Eats ³.

Neither challenger owns the couriers it depends on

Maloney claims a surge in downloads and thousands of restaurants asking to join since his role became public; no independent count exists ². Bites rides courier networks that already exist ², and Olo compares third-party fleets, Grubhub included, rather than fielding its own ⁷. DoorDash, for its part, said in September it is building agentic ordering, AI agents placing orders on diners' behalf, into iMessage↗ ¹. Revenue per order is still rising. The question on November 4, when the third-quarter results land after the close ⁴, is whether it bends.