Cost to Develop Food Delivery Apps like Talabat and Postmates

Want to know how much would it cost you to develop food delivery apps like Talabat or Postmates? If yes, this article is for you. Read on!

7 min readOct 15, 2022

It is always a challenge to find the right meal that will be suiting your taste buds. This is where the on-demand food delivery app acts as a savior. Providing customers with a wide array of meal options to choose from, alongside restaurants, as well, they get the flexibility of choice and enjoy their meals peacefully. This has been a major reason why the popularity of the food delivery business is booming and growing.

Apart from supporting customers, the venture also aids the restaurants in getting their offerings known among a wide percentage of customers, alongside being able to automate their operations. This follows next by reducing costs in plenty on infrastructure. These are major factors for the profitability of the setup being quite high indeed.

I will highlight these aspects in detail, introducing you to the ready-made clone app solutions that act as a savior in disguise for food delivery startups as it allows them to save on time and cost during app development.

So let’s begin.

Market Stats for Food Delivery Business Popularity

The food delivery business is exceptionally lucrative; getting it onboard promises exceptional profits.

Here is giving you the fun facts that elucidate the aspect in detail.

Current revenues stand at $323.30 billion in 2022.
Profits will grow at a CAGR of 7.60% between 2022 to 2027.
The market will earn profits of $466.20 billion by 2027.
The on-demand delivery segment is the most popular segment having revenues of $208 billion in 2022.
The food delivery app industry will have a market size of $320 billion by 2029.

These numbers elucidate that performing restaurant app development is the right approach. In other words, embrace on-demand food delivery app development services.

This is most prominently due to its easy operations.

How Do Food Delivery Apps like Talabat and Postmates Work?

The on-demand food delivery applications allow customers to simply place a few taps on the app as soon as they enter it and get the meals delivered to them without any form of difficulty.

Here’s how the app operates-

The customer enters the app and adds location details.
They get a list of restaurants nearby from where they can select one they want meals from and choose the food.
The user orders meals on making payment and gets notified of restaurant confirmation.
The restaurant receives the order request, and confirms it, sending a pickup request to the driver.
The driver receives a pickup request and on accepting it tracks the restaurant location and reaches.
Picks the order up and the customer is notified of the same.
Customers and delivery drivers track each other’s location in real-time.
Delivery of meals is done.

Let’s now introduce you to the popular food delivery apps globally that have made food delivery meals easily accessible to customers.

Popular Food Delivery Apps Globally

Globally, some popular food delivery applications that have revolutionized the food delivery business, on whole, are Talabat, Zomato, Postmates, UberEats, and Swiggy. I will, however, discuss the Postmates and Talabat apps, citing the nature of their popularity and listing reasons for the same.

About Postmates

Launched in 2011, Postmates has since made food delivery services easy to access for people. It also makes services like groceries available through its platform.

Having easy operations the app makes food ordering and other such tasks a cakewalk. All they have to do is enter the app, and add location details. Upon performing this action, they get a list of restaurants nearby. They need to select one from the list and order meals. Upon doing this they get the flexibility to track the order and be educated when the delivery arrives.

Here we need to discuss one offering Postmates makes available to customers, Postmates Unlimited. This allows frequent users of the platform to avoid paying delivery costs.

Let us give you market stats that cite the popularity of Postmates.

Market Stats for Postmates Popularity

Postmates has since its launch in 2011 made food and other respective kinds of deliveries easy to provide to customers. Have a look at these numbers to get an idea of what we are saying.

Revenues were $730 million in 2021.
The valuation of the app was $2.6 billion in 2020.
23% of customers subscribed to its premium service.

These factors have been responsible for the advent of the Postmates clone app, the ready-to-launch solution for the food delivery business to allow it to get its visibility immediately. This follows next by supporting it in growing flexibly without any challenges and reaching out to maximum customers.

Let us introduce you to the Talabat app now.

About Talabat

Founded in 2004, Talabat is a popular food delivery service provider in Dubai that makes food delivery offerings easy to provide to customers.

Thanks to the easy-to-offer meal delivery services Talabat has made revenues of $1 billion and currently has more than 60% of orders.

This has been a major reason for the rise of the ready-to-launch Talabat clone app that has given the restaurant setup the support to boost its visibility and get more customers.

How to Perform Food Delivery App Development?

Planning to make your place in the profitable food delivery business with Postmates or the Talabat clone app? Here are the steps whose adherence will make this easy to accomplish.

Conduct Research

You need to research your competitors and assess the customers’ requirements carefully. This means you should check what your competitors are doing. Also, you need to assess if the customers are satisfied with the services they receive.

This means you need to check the following areas-

Examine what customers feel about competitors and their solutions.
Assess features present in the competitors’ solutions and examine missing elements.
Analyze the target market and assess if your solution will meet the demands.

Choose Appropriate Design

Developing the Postmates or the Talabat clone app; you must select the appropriate design. This is possible through research.

Here is how you can perform the action-

Identify customer needs and check their satisfaction level with the current solution.
Study their solution and analyze the design they used.
Check if the design captures users and try finding new ways to engage them.

Select Business Model Wisely

There are three models a typical food delivery business follows. Therefore, select a business model wisely.

Order and delivery model where a third-party provider handles deliveries of meals, and manages the orders as well.
Order-only model where users can easily order meals from their favorite restaurant and get the delivery done at the doorstep.
A fully integrated model where a startup manages the delivery and the order and handles all aspects of deliveries.

Make App Unique

It is important when you develop a food delivery app, you work towards making it as unique as possible.

Make it feature-rich for the customer, the delivery driver, the restaurant, and the restaurant. Here are some of the key features you should consider including in your application.

Customer app features

Social media login
Advanced search filter
Customize menu
Schedule order
Multiple payment options
Push notifications
Real-time tracking
In-app call/chat
Offers and Discounts
Rating and review

Restaurant App/Panel features

Dashboard
Restaurant profile
Menu management
Food order management
Order cancellation
Order history
Chat facility

Delivery boy app features

Easy registration
Update delivery status
Accept/reject the delivery request
Earning report
In-app call
Rate & Review

Admin panel features

Seamless dashboard
Manage restaurants
Manage customers
Manage delivery boys
Order status and tracking
Promote offers and discount
Payment management

Make App Robust: Technology Stack of Food Delivery App Development:

When you build Talabat or Postmates clone app, you must work towards making it robust and fully functional. Therefore, include technology stacks that can make this easy.

Android: Kotlin, Java
iOS: Swift, Objective-C
Backend & API: Node.JS/Express.JS
Database: MongoDB, HBase, Postgres
Push Notification: Twilio, push.io
For Server: AWS
For Geolocation: Google Maps API
Payment Integration: PayPal, Braintree, Stripe
For Analytics: Google Analytics

Cost to Develop Food Delivery Clone Apps like Talabat or Postmates

When you want to know the costs to develop a robust food delivery app like Postmates or Talabat clone, there are many factors you need to consider, such as:

UI/UX design
App platform (Android, iOS, or both)
Advanced features you want to include
Complexity level
Third-party integration
The company location

However, based on the above factors, the estimated cost to build a clone app with basic features ranges from $10,000 to $15,000. If you go for advanced features, the cost might go high as per your requirements.

Wrapping Up

Food delivery apps will bring profits of $466.20 billion by 2027. Talabat or Postmates despite taking the largest chunk of the online food delivery industry, the business is still growing. If you are considering conceiving a food delivery clone of these apps, the time is right! Grab this opportunity. You will be able to take your business to new heights and earn revenues like never before. To make this fruitful, hire a reputed food delivery app development company.