I get asked this more often now that everyone has heard a story about some restaurant that built their own app and cut DoorDash out of the picture. The short answer is: maybe. The longer answer requires you to do some math you might not want to do.
First, the math nobody talks about out loud
DoorDash and Uber Eats charge restaurants somewhere between 15 and 30 percent per order depending on your plan and how desperate you were when you signed. Airbnb takes around 15 percent from hosts on most bookings. VRBO is similar. These aren’t small numbers when you add them up across a month.
If your restaurant does $15,000 a month through delivery apps and you’re giving up 25 percent, that’s $3,750 a month. $45,000 a year. At that scale, a custom ordering app that costs $8,000 to $15,000 to build pays for itself inside the first six months if you can shift even a portion of your delivery volume to it. That’s not a pitch. That’s arithmetic.
Vacation rental works the same way. If Airbnb is taking $1,200 a month off your gross bookings, a direct booking system that pays for itself in less than a year isn’t a luxury project. It’s a business decision.
So why doesn’t everyone do it?
A few reasons. One is that apps have a reputation for being expensive and complicated to build, which is partly true and partly a myth depending on what you’re actually trying to do. A custom restaurant ordering system isn’t the same scope as what Uber built. A direct booking portal for your vacation rental portfolio isn’t an enterprise software project.
Another reason is distribution. Airbnb brings you guests you wouldn’t have found otherwise. A direct booking app only helps you capture guests you’re already getting some other way. If 100 percent of your bookings come through the platforms, you can’t just replace them with an app overnight. You need a strategy to drive direct traffic first, usually through a good website, email list, and return guests who know you.
The third reason is that a lot of restaurant and rental owners tried to get an app built and got burned by someone who underdelivered. That’s a real thing that happens and it makes people gun-shy.
When it makes sense
A custom app makes sense for your restaurant if you already have a loyal customer base that orders regularly, you’re losing a meaningful amount to platform fees each month, and you have some way to tell your customers “hey, order direct and skip the fees” (an email list, a loyalty program, an Instagram following, whatever).
It makes sense for vacation rental if you have repeat guests, you do your own marketing, and you want to own the guest relationship instead of being one of a thousand listings on a platform you don’t control.
It probably doesn’t make sense if you’re just starting out, if the platforms are your only source of new customers, or if you’re not in a position to promote a direct booking option actively.
What I actually build
I build commission-free ordering systems for restaurants and direct booking platforms for vacation rental businesses. Both are custom to your operation, not off-the-shelf software with your logo on it. You own the code. No monthly percentage. No platform telling you what you can charge or threatening to delist you.
I also build AI phone systems for businesses that want to handle calls and bookings without someone physically answering the phone around the clock, which tends to come up a lot in the hospitality world.
If you want to talk through whether any of this actually makes financial sense for your situation, that conversation is free. Reach out here or call me and we’ll run the numbers together before you commit to anything.