Industry · 7 min read ·
Food delivery and on-demand app development
On-demand is three apps and a dispatch engine pretending to be one product: customer, courier, merchant. Underestimating that shape is the most common reason these builds run double their budget.
Dispatch is the product
Matching orders to couriers under changing conditions — prep times, traffic, batching, cancellations — is where your margin lives. Start with a transparent rules engine you can tune by hand and instrument heavily before anyone mentions machine learning.
Live tracking that does not drain batteries
Courier location needs adaptive sampling: high frequency near pickup and dropoff, low frequency in transit, with a socket channel to customers and graceful degradation to polling. A tracking screen that shows an honest ETA beats one that shows a jittery dot.
- Merchant tablet app with loud, reliable order alerts
- Courier app tuned for background location and battery
- Real-time ETA with visible order state
- Refund, substitution and cancellation flows built early
Unit economics belong in the build
Instrument delivery time, batching rate, cancellation cause, and cost per order from launch. These numbers, not app-store ratings, decide whether the business survives the second year.
The takeaway
Budget for three clients and a dispatch service. The customer app is the smallest part of an on-demand build.