Excessively marked-up prices feel inescapable online, even when I’m just trying to grab dinner.
I’m often hit with eye-popping menu costs and shifting fees when ordering through popular apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash. The major players charge restaurants commissions on each order, and those expenses often pass down to consumers, inflating the price of that chicken Caesar salad wrap.
Apps that initially felt like a convenient way to order food can now seem like a bad deal. But that’s what Olo, a new food-delivery app launching nationwide today on Android and iOS, is trying to avoid.
“Restaurants are paying 20 to 30 percent commissions to the marketplaces and are offsetting that by increasing the price,” says Noah Glass, Olo’s founder and CEO. The core selling point is that it doesn’t use this kind of menu markup.
On Olo, restaurants charge users the same menu price posted in-store, and Olo’s service fee is a flat 5 percent. Yes, you still have to pay a fee for delivery.
Courtesy of Olo
While you could save money by ordering directly from the restaurant, Glass sees Olo as a potential middle ground for people who still want the ease of a streamlined food-ordering app without all of the ever-changing fees and menu prices. The app includes 250 brands at launch, with plans to expand that offering.
Olo also eliminates one of the most frustrating problems in modern food-ordering apps: incessant ads. I can’t search for anything without getting bamboozled by sponsored listings. Olo shows a fairly streamlined list of restaurants near you that are available on the app as well as past items you might want to consider reordering.
The name “Olo” may not sound familiar, but there’s a chance you’ve interacted with the company’s software already. The consumer-facing food-delivery app is new, but Glass has worked in the digital ordering space for over two decades. He launched a startup called Mobo in 2005—before the iPhone—which was innovative for facilitating coffee shop orders via text messages.
Mobo was eventually renamed Olo as it slowly morphed into a behind-the-scenes software facilitator for restaurants, helping process their digital menus. Today, Olo claims it assists customers placing more than 3.5 million orders every day. These orders happen through desktop sites, smartphones, and even kiosk touchscreens.
It will be difficult to convince users to switch from their delivery app of choice—an app they’ve likely used for years. Even so, Glass is well positioned as an insurgent, with deep connections in the restaurant industry and a desire to target a core weakness of the major food delivery apps: inflated prices.
The next time I get a chicken Caesar salad wrap delivered for dinner, I’ll check Olo to see if it costs less. A deal is a deal, even when I’m being lazy on my couch.