How to sell food through GrabFood and GoFood in Indonesia and what the fees are
The short version on money: signing a restaurant up is free, the platform takes a 20% commission per order in Indonesia and 30% in Thailand, and ads cost whatever you put into them — our median is 5.6% of revenue.
And now the thing that is missing from that list. In our Bali sample, restaurants lose around 25% of revenue to downtime and stock-outs. That is comparable to the commission — except the commission is not yours to change, and those 25% entirely are.
Below is the whole cost structure and which parts of it you can actually manage. The numbers come from the dashboards of 96 restaurants in Bali and Phuket, January–August 2026.
What the platforms take
Indonesia — 20% of the order value. Thailand — 30%. Deducted automatically at payout.
Finding that figure from the platform itself is not easy, and it works differently by country. Grab Thailand states the range publicly — 15–30% — and its own explainer walks through an example where the commission is 30%. In Indonesia neither Grab nor GoFood discloses the rate: Grab’s merchant terms say plainly that the Service Fee is set by a separate Commercial Terms and Conditions document, signed individually with each merchant and changeable on seven days’ notice.
The practical conclusion matters more than the number itself. Your rate is not a public constant but a term of your contract: it can differ from the restaurant next door and it can change. The first thing to do is find your own current document and read the rate there, rather than in someone else’s blog post.
Can the rate be negotiated down
You can. But what the platform offers in exchange is almost always the same thing: become its exclusive partner. A lower commission in return for leaving the other services. What you have to count here is not percentages but channels.
In Indonesia, exclusivity means giving up all your GoFood revenue. Or all your GrabFood revenue — depending on who you signed with.
In Thailand it means giving up all your LINE MAN turnover, which on that market is not small at all.
A discount on the rate is a few percent of what remains. A lost channel is tens of percent of turnover that is simply gone. In our experience the second outweighs the first almost every time: being on every aggregator and paying the same commission as everyone else beats sitting on one at a reduced rate.
And separately, the part that is invisible at signing. Exclusivity makes your entire sales channel dependent on one platform’s decisions: its algorithm, its rates, its programmes. While things go well this is unnoticeable. The moment something changes against you, there is no second leg to stand on.
Why paying the commission is normal
20 or 30 percent looks like a big number until you look at what it buys. The platform has assembled an audience that arrives already intending to order food. It built the logistics and maintains the couriers. It runs the support that sorts things out when an order does not arrive. It pays for the marketing that got the person to open the app in the first place. What is left for the restaurant is to cook the food and hand it to the courier.
It is not a tax, it is the price of a ready-made sales channel. The comparison is not with zero, it is with what it would cost you to assemble the same audience yourself.
Hence the common advice to "leave the aggregators and build your own channel". Your own site, your own WhatsApp, your own customer base — it sounds like a way to stop paying commission. In practice it means you become the platform: you acquire the customer, you own the delivery, you handle the complaint when the courier is late. The commission did not disappear; the bill simply arrives as your time and your marketing budget instead of money. An own channel makes sense alongside the platforms for repeat orders — not as a replacement for the channel that brings a new customer in.
So the productive question is not "how do I pay less" but "how do I get the most out of those 20 or 30 percent". The platform has already brought you the customer and delivered the order. Everything that happens after that is decided by how well your part is done: the listing, the menu, the prices, the speed, the rating. That is what the rest of this page is about.
What the cost is made of
Signing up is free: the restaurant registers in the platform’s merchant tool — GrabMerchant for Grab, GoBiz for Gojek — sets up the menu, the photos and the payout details. The money starts after that.
| Line | How much | Who controls it |
|---|---|---|
| Platform commission | 20% Indonesia · 30% Thailand | the platform |
| Ads | median 5.6% of revenue | you |
| Promos and discounts | your decision | you |
| Losses to stock-outs and downtime | ≈25% of revenue | you |
Three of the four lines are yours. And the biggest of yours is the one that usually is not counted at all.
The cost line that never appears in the report
We measured the lost revenue from each venue’s own order rate: how many orders the restaurant normally takes in that hour, and what it did not take while it was closed or while an item was switched off. Over the period, Bali came to ≈Rp 16.2bn against Rp 64.7bn of revenue — around 25%.
| Source of loss | Share of losses |
|---|---|
| Items out of stock | 95% |
| Restaurant downtime and cancellations | 5% |
Ninety-five percent. Not a closed restaurant, not cancelled orders — menu items switched off and never switched back on. One ingredient ran out, the item came down, the ingredient arrived that evening, and nobody put the item back. It goes on not selling for weeks, and in the report it looks like "demand dropped".
For comparison: cancellations run at a median of 0.35% of orders. They are visible, they worry people, they get discussed. They are fifty times smaller than what is lost silently.
Ads: 5.6% is not "the market", it is ads that are already managed
The 5.6% median is across our fleet, that is, across accounts that are being managed. It is an outcome, not a starting point. Restaurants arrive with very different figures: 10%, 15%, 20%, and sometimes 30% of revenue going into ads. And the reason is almost always the same — the ads were launched but never measured.
The logic of a contractor told to "raise orders" is simple: switch on everything that can be switched on and widen the reach. Orders do grow, turnover grows, the report looks great. Nobody checks what each additional order cost or whether it would have come without ads at all.
What the break looks like is only visible across a fleet — you cannot see this curve from inside one restaurant:
| Ad spend as share of revenue | Restaurants | Median ROAS |
|---|---|---|
| 0–2% | 7 | 12,1x |
| 2–4% | 16 | 12,8x |
| 4–6% | 26 | 11,8x |
| 6–8% | 19 | 9,6x |
| over 8% | 16 | 6,9x |
The break sits at around 6% of revenue: below it the median ROAS holds at 12.1x, above it drops to 8.6x. And 42% of our own fleet is past that line — this is not somebody else’s problem.
A restaurant putting 20% of revenue into ads pays the platform a commission and, on top of it, a second commission — to itself, for not doing the maths.
A check you can run on the spot: a ROAS below 5x occurs in only 6% of the fleet. If yours is lower, that is not "the market" — it is something broken in the listing, the bidding or the promos.
Discounts: the most underrated cost line
A promo does not look like a cost. You are not transferring money to anyone — the price on the listing is simply lower. That is why discounts are handed out most easily and eat margin faster than anything else.
What to count is not the number of orders on the promo but what is left after the discount, the platform commission and the ad spend. A promo that does not pay back looks like order growth and behaves like a loss — and the loss grows at exactly the rate at which it "works". And the question almost nobody asks: would those orders not have come without the discount? Some share of promo orders are people who would have ordered anyway, only cheaper.
In our experience, in tourist areas discounts are not needed at all.
A tourist does not choose on price: they are in an unfamiliar city, going by the photo, the rating and the delivery time, and price is not their main filter. A discount in such a place does not bring a new customer, it simply shrinks the bill of someone who was ordering anyway. This is the case where switching promos off raises profit without losing a single order.
This does not mean "never discount". It means every promo has to answer what it brought beyond what would have happened anyway — and if there is no answer, switch it off and see what changes.
You cannot change the commission — but you can stop paying it blind
The rate is a given. What is manageable here is not the percentage but the sum it is taken from and what remains after it.
An item that is profitable at a table can go negative once commission and packaging are counted. Run unit economics per item, not an average across the menu.
The fleet median basket is Rp 250k, with half the restaurants between Rp 194k and 296k. Commission is a percentage, while the work of assembling an order is nearly identical for a small basket and a large one.
A discount that looks sensible against the menu price can mean working at a loss once commission is deducted.
Who does this
The stop list is daily work: items go off during the day and have to come back the same day, not whenever someone notices. Prices are recalculated on every change of commission or cost. Promos are costed before launch, not after. Ads are run on cost per order, not on order count.
There are four options: the owner, an in-house manager, a freelancer or an agency. We broke the difference down separately — who should run GrabFood and GoFood. If orders are low and it is not clear why, start from the other end: few orders — where to start looking for the cause.
We are Delivery Booster, the agency that runs delivery for restaurants in Bali and Phuket. Every number above comes from our benchmark across 96 restaurants and from our clients’ dashboards, not from illustrations.
Frequently asked
What commission do GrabFood and GoFood charge in Indonesia?
20% of the order value. In Thailand it is 30%. The platforms do not publish the Indonesian rate: Grab’s merchant terms state that the Service Fee is set by a separate Commercial Terms and Conditions document and can change on seven days’ notice. The figure above is what we see in our clients’ dashboards.
Can I negotiate a lower commission?
Such options exist, but the condition is usually exclusivity: a lower rate in exchange for leaving the other platforms. In Indonesia that means giving up all your GoFood or all your GrabFood revenue; in Thailand, all your LINE MAN turnover. A few percentage points off the rate almost never cover the loss of an entire channel. What is manageable about commission is not the percentage but the sum it is taken from and what is left after.
How much should I spend on ads?
The median across our fleet is 5.6% of revenue — but those are accounts that are already managed. Restaurants come to us at 10, 15, 20 and even 30%. Rather than a share, watch the break point: past 6% of revenue the median ROAS drops from 12.1x to 8.6x. Beyond that line extra budget buys increasingly expensive orders.
Do I need discounts?
In tourist areas, in our experience, no. A tourist does not choose on price: they are in an unfamiliar city and go by the photo, the rating and the delivery time. A discount there does not bring a new customer, it shrinks the bill of someone who would have ordered anyway. Every promo has to answer what it brought beyond what would have happened without it.
How much am I actually losing to stock-outs?
In our Bali sample, around 25% of revenue goes to downtime and stock-outs, and 95% of that is switched-off menu items. It is the first number worth calculating for yourself: it usually turns out larger than the owner expects and, unlike the commission, it is entirely within your control.
Keep reading
Two ways to go from here
Both work. The first costs nothing and does not require us.
The method and the norms — open and free
The five stages we run on every account, published in full. Alongside them, market norms from 96 restaurants so you have something to compare your numbers against.
An audit of your listing
Paste your restaurant’s Grab link and the report comes back in a couple of minutes: menu and search, photo coverage, reviews, prices against the neighbours. Free, no strings; after that it is 10% of delivery revenue with no upfront payment.
Diagnose my listingor message us directly →