Ordering, delivery, reservations and restaurant operations. Food apps are judged at the worst moment, a Friday dinner rush, so the engineering that matters is the part that keeps orders flowing when the kitchen is slammed and the POS is busy.
Pickup and delivery with modifiers and upsells
Driver assignment, routing and live tracking
Table management, waitlists and no-show handling
Scan-to-order and pay-at-table
Points, rewards and targeted promotions
Ticket routing, prep timing and expo screens
Menus, pricing and hours per venue
Card, wallet, split and tip flows
The system has to hold at peak, not at average
One source of truth across app, web, POS and marketplaces
An order must never be silently lost between app and kitchen
Ingredient and allergen data treated as safety-critical
Geofencing, fees and realistic time estimates
Printers and KDS units fail: the flow needs a fallback
Partial refunds, voids and tip adjustments after close
Quoting times the kitchen can actually meet
Ranges, not quotes. Scope, integrations and compliance work move these, so the number we give you after a discovery call is the one that means something.
An ordering MVP for a single location runs $35,000-$75,000. A full app with both mobile platforms, POS integration, loyalty and multi-location support runs $75,000-$150,000. A multi-brand or franchise platform with dispatch and kitchen display runs $150,000-$250,000+. POS integration is usually the largest single variable, because the depth of each POS's API differs enormously.
Usually. Toast, Square, Clover, Lightspeed and Revel all expose APIs, though what they let you read and write varies: some allow full order injection, others are effectively read-only for menu and sales data. We check the specific capability you need against your POS during discovery, because that answer determines whether orders can flow straight to the kitchen or need a staff-facing step.
Most restaurants end up doing both. Marketplaces bring discovery and charge heavily for it; a direct channel keeps margin and the customer relationship but you have to drive traffic to it yourself. The usual pattern is to keep marketplace presence for reach while moving repeat customers to direct ordering with loyalty, and to sync menus centrally so the two never disagree.
By designing for peak rather than average: load testing against your busiest realistic hour, queuing order writes so a slow POS cannot drop a ticket, and building explicit fallbacks for when a printer or kitchen display goes offline. We also pilot at one venue through a real service before rolling out: a Friday night is a better test than any staging environment.
Three to four months for an ordering MVP, five to eight for a full app, eight to fourteen for a multi-brand platform. POS certification and the single-venue pilot are the phases that most often extend, and both are worth the time.
Tell us what you are trying to ship and we will tell you what it takes — scope, timeline and the parts that usually go wrong.