Olo's New App Undercuts DoorDash and Uber Eats — Using Their Own Drivers

Olo says its new delivery app saves customers 15% to 30% by charging the same menu prices diners pay in-store — while dispatching couriers from 27 delivery services, including DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber. The company doesn't employ a single driver of its own.

That's the bet CEO and founder Noah Glass is making as Olo, a restaurant software firm most consumers have never heard of, steps directly into consumer food delivery. Olo has spent nearly two decades running ordering and payment systems for restaurants. Glass likens it to Shopify, which provides backend services to online sellers.

The app, unveiled last month, covers about 800 restaurant brands. When an order comes in, Olo checks which drivers are available on each service and how much the delivery would cost, then picks the winner.

"We're finding the best option at that moment," Glass told Business Insider.

Why menu pricing matters now

Most third-party delivery apps mark up menu prices. Olo doesn't, and Glass argues the timing is right: rising food costs are squeezing diners, with some cutting back or hunting meal deals at chains like McDonald's.

Many customers "just look at the menu price and say, 'Wow, restaurants have gotten way more expensive all of a sudden,'" Glass said. Cutting out markups makes restaurant delivery appealing again — or so the argument goes.

The tradeoff is real, though. Olo's model depends entirely on the capacity and pricing of the very competitors it's challenging. If DoorDash or Uber raise their delivery rates for Olo-routed orders, the price advantage narrows. Glass didn't address that scenario; the model works only as long as the marketplaces keep supplying cheap, available couriers.

Olo already has millions of users

You may have used Olo without knowing it. The company powers ordering through restaurants' own apps and websites for brands from Panda Express to Five Guys. Around 40 million customers have created Olo accounts that way, Glass said, and the new app gives those accounts a single place to order across multiple restaurants.

"They've gone to Waffle House, and they've ordered and created an account," he said. "They can now go to any of the other brands that use Olo accounts as a login mechanism."

The app handles both delivery and pickup. Most of the roughly 3.5 million orders Olo processes daily are takeout — meaning delivery is the growth frontier, not the core. Olo was publicly traded until private equity firm Thoma Bravo acquired it in 2025.

A crowded, hardening market

Olo enters a field that keeps consolidating. DoorDash, already dominant in restaurant delivery, has agreed to acquire grocery-focused Instacart, a deal that would extend its reach. Walmart is now using its own delivery workers to bring customers restaurant meals alongside weekly grocery hauls.

Olo's differentiation is price transparency plus a multi-network dispatch layer. Whether that's enough against incumbents with proprietary driver fleets and consumer habit on their side is the open question.

The AI agent angle

Glass is also building a protocol to accept orders from AI agents, and he thinks Olo's pricing edge could attract agents comparing apps on cost. Order volumes through AI agents remain low today, but Glass said they could become "another COVID-like or maybe even larger wave" of orders.

For product teams, the strategy is a case study in aggregation: own the ordering interface and the customer account, rent the fulfillment. If agentic ordering takes off, price comparison happens automatically — and the cheapest verified menu price wins. That's where delivery economics may be heading.