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Free Delivery Tools for Restaurants

Three calculators for owners who run, or are thinking about running, their own delivery drivers. Each one works in your browser, shows its arithmetic, and lets you copy, print or share the result.

By KwickSpot Editorial Team · Updated September 21, 2026

Restaurant worker in an apron handing a brown paper takeout bag across the counter to a customer
Photo: Kampus Production / Pexels
Delivery driver in a yellow shirt handing a paper bag out of his car window

In-House vs Third-Party Delivery Cost Calculator

What one delivery costs with your own driver, against the commission a marketplace keeps on the same order.

  • Cost per delivery, both ways
  • Monthly and annual difference
  • Break-even orders per week, charted
Open the calculator →
Delivery driver carrying a pizza box along a residential street

Driver Pay & Mileage Reimbursement Calculator

IRS-rate mileage, a flat amount per delivery, or hourly plus tips: what the driver keeps after the car, and what you pay.

  • Driver’s effective hourly earnings
  • Restaurant cost per delivery
  • Minimum-wage and tip-credit checks
Open the calculator →
Phone on a car dashboard showing GPS navigation for a delivery route

Delivery Zone & ETA Planner

Turn prep time, driving speed and drivers on shift into a radius you can serve and an ETA you can keep.

  • Recommended maximum radius
  • ETA window to quote, fleet capacity
  • Three fee zones with cost to serve
Open the planner →

When in-house delivery beats the marketplace

A marketplace charges a percentage of every order. DoorDash’s published US delivery plans are 15%, 25% and 30%; Uber Eats lists 20%, 25% and 30% (DoorDash pricing, Uber Eats pricing, as of September 2026). Your own driver costs roughly the same whether the bag holds $18 of food or $80. That single difference explains most of the decision.

In-house delivery tends to win when:

  • Order values are high. A percentage fee on a $60 family order is a lot of money; the drive is no longer than for a $20 lunch.
  • Customers already know you. Paying commission to reach a regular who would have called anyway buys you nothing. Paying it to reach a stranger can be worth it.
  • Orders are dense. Many addresses close together keep a driver moving. Two deliveries per paid hour and four per paid hour are different businesses.
  • Volume is steady enough to schedule. A driver waiting for orders is still paid, so predictable peaks matter more than total volume.

The marketplace tends to win when you deliver a few orders a night, when orders are scattered across a wide area, or when most of your delivery customers discovered you inside the app. Many restaurants end up with both: the marketplace for discovery, their own drivers for the customers they already have. The cost calculator is built around exactly that split.

Paying drivers fairly without guessing

A driver using a personal car is spending real money on every run. How you pay that back — by the mile, by the delivery, or not at all — changes both what the driver actually earns and your exposure under wage rules. The pay and mileage calculator puts the three common models side by side using the current IRS rate and links to the U.S. Department of Labor guidance behind the caveats.

Promising only what you can deliver

Most late deliveries are decided before the driver leaves: the zone was too wide for the drivers on shift, or the quoted time ignored the wait for a free driver. The zone and ETA planner turns your prep time, road speed and staffing into a radius and a quote window, and shows when capacity rather than distance is your real limit.

What to measure first

All three tools are only as good as the numbers you feed them. Four are worth pulling from your POS or a week of tally sheets before you start:

Deliveries per paid driver-hourTotal deliveries ÷ total hours drivers were on the clock, including waiting. The most sensitive number in every calculation here.
Round-trip miles per deliveryFrom trip logs or a map check of twenty recent addresses. Drives mileage cost, driver pay and zone size.
Own-customer shareWhat fraction of delivery orders come from people who ordered direct before, or would. Only these orders can move in-house.
Door time at peakMinutes from order accepted to food handed over, on your busiest hour. This is what your quoted ETA has to survive.

How these tools are made

  • Sourced figures (IRS mileage rate, federal wage rules, published commission plans) link to the primary source with an “as of” date.
  • Everything else is an editable example, labelled as such. We do not publish “industry average” numbers we cannot source.
  • Nothing you type leaves your browser. There is no sign-up and no email gate.
  • They are planning aids, not legal, tax or payroll advice.

Running your own drivers?

KwickSpot is the GPS driver tracking built into KwickPOS: assign orders from the POS, see drivers on a live map and send customers an ETA. The tools on this page are free either way.

See KwickPOS