The consumer food delivery app lives or dies on the 90 seconds between opening and checkout.
We build consumer-facing mobile apps for food delivery startups — browse, order, real-time tracking, ratings, and the loyalty flows that turn a first order into a weekly habit. Fixed scope, fixed price.
You've proven your delivery concept. Now you need an actual consumer app — not a Glide prototype — that competes on experience with DoorDash and converts the users your marketing brings in.
Consumer food delivery is one of the most UX-sensitive product categories in existence. The average user opens DoorDash, picks a restaurant, builds an order, and checks out in under three minutes. Your app doesn't have to beat DoorDash on every feature — but it has to match it on the core loop: browse, order, track, done. Any friction in that loop costs you an order completion, and with delivery startup margins being what they are, every order counts.
Most early-stage delivery startups ship the consumer app last — after they've proven the ops model and signed restaurant partners. That's sensible. But when you do build it, you're building against a UX expectation set by billion-dollar apps. A Glide app that looks like a form doesn't meet that bar. Neither does a React Native codebase that someone built in three weeks without accounting for performance on a three-year-old Android phone.
The consumer app also has to earn loyalty. The first order you might win on novelty or promotion. The second order you win if the experience was effortless and the food arrived on time. The third order you win if you've given them a reason to open the app before they're hungry — push notifications done well, a loyalty points balance that's visible, and restaurant discovery that surfaces something new.
A consumer delivery app on iOS and Android that loads fast, makes ordering obvious, tracks orders live, and gives customers a reason to open it again next week.
Restaurant discovery and browse
Category filters, cuisine type, delivery time estimate, ratings, and search — with smart ranking that surfaces popular items and new partners based on the user's history.
Menu and order flow optimised for speed
One-tap reorder from history, modifier selection without dead ends, special instructions, and cart that persists between sessions.
Real-time order tracking
Restaurant accepted → being prepared → picked up → en route — with live driver location and ETA countdown, push updates at every stage.
Ratings and reviews post-delivery
Per-order, per-restaurant, and per-driver ratings collected immediately post-delivery when the experience is fresh.
Loyalty and push engagement
Points per order, streak rewards, and push notifications for offers, estimated delivery time on reorders, and new restaurant openings. Built with Expo and React Native for iOS and Android, Convex for real-time order state, Stripe for payments, and the shared backend that connects to the restaurant portal and driver dispatch app.
One honest number to start.
Fixed-scope, fixed-price. The number below is the starting point — final scope is built from your brief.
A consumer delivery app on iOS and Android that loads fast, makes ordering obvious, tracks orders live, and gives customers a reason to open it again next week.
Three steps, every time.
The same repeatable engagement on every project. No surprises, no mystery, no billable ambiguity.
Brief & discovery.
We send you questions, then get on a call. Output: a written scope with every step, feature, and integration listed.
Build & ship.
Fixed schedule, weekly reviews. No scope creep unless you change the scope — and if you do, we reprice it transparently.
Warranty & retainer.
30-day warranty on every launch. Most clients stay on a monthly retainer for ongoing features and maintenance.
Why Fixed-Price Matters Here
Delivery startups are burning cash on both sides — driver acquisition and restaurant onboarding — while the consumer app is being built. A fixed-price, 12-week consumer app build is a known line on the spreadsheet, not a variable that changes every month. Fixed scope, fixed cost, shipped before the next growth push.
Related engagements.
Questions, answered.
They share a backend, but they're separate apps with separate UIs. The consumer app is the customer-facing product. The restaurant portal and driver app are operations tools. We can build all three as a platform, or start with one and add the others.
We calculate ETA from current restaurant preparation time (pulled from your restaurant portal or set by the restaurant on login), driver assignment time, and routing from Google Maps. Customers see a range, and it updates live as the order progresses.
Browse restaurants, build an order, pay via Stripe, track the order live, and rate the delivery. That's a shippable consumer app. Loyalty, saved addresses, group ordering, and scheduled delivery are phase two.
A full consumer app with browse, order, track, ratings, and loyalty on iOS and Android typically runs $60k–$120k when built with the ops backend. Consumer-only (connecting to an existing ops layer) is $45k–$80k. Fixed-price.
12 to 16 weeks for a full consumer app build, including App Store and Google Play submissions.
Tell Ryel about your project.
Describe what you’re building and what outcome you need. You’ll have a written, fixed-price scope within the week.