Customer app
Menus with modifiers, a basket, address and delivery slot, Stripe payment, order tracking on a map, re-order from history. iOS and Android from one codebase.
App costs · About 8 weeks
How much does a food delivery app cost in 2026?
A delivery app is three apps and a dispatcher: the customer orders, the restaurant accepts, the courier moves, and the system assigns and tracks all of it live. Version one is a Product Build at the top of the band, $20K–$25K, about eight weeks, and it should be far smaller than the apps it is compared with.
Typical price
$20K–$25K
Tier
Time
About 8 weeks
Platforms
Customer iOS + Android, restaurant and courier on web
Where the number comes from
The cost is in the number of roles, not the ordering screen. Customers browse menus, build a basket, pay and watch a map. Restaurants need a tablet-friendly view to accept, prepare and mark orders ready, with menu editing and opening hours. Couriers need a queue, a navigation handoff and a status button that works one-handed on a bike. Three interfaces, one order moving between them in real time.
Real-time is the second cost. Order status and courier location update over WebSockets to everyone watching, and the assignment logic has to pick a courier, handle a rejection and retry without a human. The live map, card payments and status updates were built here for RapidCharge, where the thing being tracked is a charging session instead of a meal, and the patterns carry over.
The top of the band buys a city-sized version one: customer apps on both stores, web dashboards for restaurants and couriers, Stripe with a platform fee, and a nearest-free-courier dispatcher. It does not buy route optimisation, surge pricing or a self-serve restaurant marketplace, and no first version should.
What the price includes
The scope, as it would be written.
Restaurant dashboard
Incoming orders with a sound, accept with a prep time, mark ready, pause the menu, edit items and hours. Built for a tablet on a counter.
Courier app
Available orders, accept, pick up, deliver, with one-tap navigation handoff and location shared while on a job. Web-first, so it works on any phone without a store install.
Dispatch and live status
Nearest free courier, automatic reassignment on timeout, and order state pushed to customer, restaurant and courier at the same moment.
Payments and payouts
The customer pays once; restaurants and couriers are paid out through Stripe Connect with your fee kept. Refunds and tips handled.
What moves the price
Four things that change the number.
A native courier app
A web courier app is enough to start. Background location and offline queues in a native app add about two weeks.
Restaurants onboarding themselves
Self-serve signup, menu import and verification make the restaurant side a marketplace, and that is a second phase.
Route optimisation and batching
Multi-drop routes and batched orders are algorithms, not screens. Buy a routing API when volume justifies it.
Promotions
Coupons, first-order discounts and loyalty touch pricing, payment and the admin at once. Cheap individually, costly together.
Built here
RapidCharge
EV charging network app · Live map, booking, payments · iOS + Android
The live map, card payments and real-time status were built for RapidCharge; a delivery app reuses the same patterns with a meal in place of a charging session.
Questions
What people ask about food delivery app costs.
- Why is this at the top of the band?
- Three roles, real-time tracking and split payments. Each is a Product Build on its own in a simpler app; here they are in one. The scope stays inside $25K by keeping version one to one city, one dispatch rule and web dashboards for restaurants and couriers.
- Can I start smaller?
- Yes. A single-restaurant ordering app, pickup or delivery by your own staff, with Stripe and an order board, is a $5K MVP Sprint. Plenty of delivery businesses started as one kitchen.
- Which maps do you use?
- Google Maps or Mapbox for the customer map and geocoding, with the courier's turn-by-turn handed to the maps app already on their phone. API costs scale with orders and sit in your account.
- How long until launch?
- About eight weeks from the signed scope to store submission, with the customer ordering flow running on the web by the end of week one. Review time at the stores is outside the date.
Already built it?
If the food delivery app exists already, built in Lovable, Bolt, Cursor or Replit, the number on this page is not yours: the $1.5K fixed Production Audit reads that food delivery app against the published checklist and quotes its fixes in five days.
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