A platform fee is a charge that an online ordering platform adds to each order, paid either by the customer at checkout or by the restaurant out of the order value, in return for using the platform's ordering technology. In India you meet it in two forms. Delivery apps add a few rupees to the customer's bill under that label, and direct ordering platforms charge the restaurant a fixed amount per order or a small percentage on online payments. It is separate from commission, which is a percentage cut of the order value, and from the payment gateway charge, which the gateway takes on card and UPI transactions.
Why it matters
How the fee is structured decides what a bigger order costs you. A flat fee stays the same whether the order is ₹150 or ₹1,500; a percentage grows with the ticket. Who pays matters too. A customer-side fee makes your menu look dearer than the competition, while a merchant-side fee comes straight out of margin. Before you sign up with any platform, read the fee table alongside the subscription price, and check whether the fee also applies to cash on delivery and dine-in orders. Platform fee, commission and per-order fee compared walks through all three.
Example
Say you do 500 orders a month at an average of ₹400. A delivery app commission of 25 percent costs ₹100 per order, or ₹50,000 a month. A flat platform fee of ₹10 per order costs ₹5,000. A 2 percent platform fee on online payments costs ₹8 per order, or ₹4,000, but it climbs as your average order grows and sits on top of the gateway charge of roughly 2 percent that you pay anyway. The flat fee is the only one of the three that does not rise when you sell more per order.
Tezzu charges a flat ₹10 per order with zero commission on every plan, and if you connect your own Razorpay account there is no platform fee on online payments; see how Tezzu pricing works.