Breaking Down Real Development Costs for Restaurant Ordering Platforms
Summary: Building & launching a food ordering app like Grill’d in Australia will take enough investment into developing a mobile app, which ranges from $80,000 to $250,000, depending on how complex your features are and how you structure your team. The cost depends on whether you hire app developers in Australia or use additional resources, the developers you choose, and what payment systems and restaurant management tools you need to integrate with. This blog reveals the scope of actual development stages, team structures, and budget allocations based on app structures that are similar to the project you requested here. The cost drivers filtered here will provide insight for restaurant owners to assist their digital transformation strategy.
Introduction
Grill’d was initially just one restaurant in Melbourne, Australia, but eventually, it became a chain with more than 140 stores all over the country. Part of their achievement is the use of their mobile order-ahead system that features live menu changes, reward programs, and local ordering together with simple payment. If you’re on the verge of starting something similar yourself and are probably wondering how much this will realistically cost, we’ll provide a transparency of the real numbers involved when hiring dedicated Android app developers. We can break these down further for team structure comparisons. Finally, we will illustrate where your funding goes.
Problem: The Hidden Costs Nobody Talks About
Most restaurant business owners look at the Grill’d app. It’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it? You add a menu, customers make an order, and you process payments. It can’t be that hard? But the realities are messier than that.
The Technical Complexity Nobody Talks About
Food ordering apps have an exceptional responsibility to manage to satisfy your customers’ experience. Some are managed from the app, and some are managed outside of the app. Your app will need to communicate with your point of sale system, send messages to the kitchen, update your stock levels, process payments, and return order confirmations to customers in a matter of seconds – not minutes.
You Are Building for Two Mobile Devices, Not For A Single One
The first scenario means that businesses have to make two different mobile applications for which development teams have to be separate. As a result, they duplicate codebases and maintenance work. The other choice implies that they will spend more time and money on their project.
For instance, a restaurant group from Brisbane made separate apps for each kind of phone in 2024. They contacted two platforms for development, and the total investment was $187,000. The apps were efficiently loaded in less than a couple of seconds, and no one seriously complained about the technical issues after the apps were launched.
The average loading time for their application was 1.8 seconds. To challenge the restaurant chain, another one decided to use React Native single code base for both phones; they paid $94,000 in total, and launched 11 weeks earlier than their competitor. The average loading time for their app was 3.2 seconds. The performance of the native applications was better; however, the React Native application was available to the market faster. Budgets and trade-offs are different.
Payment Security is Not Optional
Australia has strict payment security regulations. You can’t simply store credit card numbers on your server and hope for the best. You will need to comply with PCI-DSS regulations, which means you will need to build a specific security architecture and get certified. Integrating payment processors like Stripe or Square will also require verification of security and record-keeping of all details.
One food delivery app development company working out of Melbourne told me that payment security took up 18% of their overall project time for a recent app. This includes security reviews, setup of encrypted communications, handling payment tokens, and documentation for compliance audit. If you skip this, you’re taking a risk of fines of up to $2.2 million in accordance with Australian privacy regulations. Not a good idea to try and cut costs here.
Agitation: When Projects Go Wrong
Not Meeting Deadlines Costs Money
A restaurant group in Perth planned for 16 weeks and budgeted $95,000 to develop their app. They hired dedicated Android app developers from a local agency. At week 12, they realized their cash register system would not send the menu information in the format to be used in the app. As a consequence, they made a decision to have custom software developed that would allow the cash register to translate the data, which added 6 extra weeks of development and $31,000 of extra expense. As a result, their app would miss its biggest trade season and launch 22 weeks later than planned. They estimated that the app’s poor performance cost them about $340,000 in missed sales.
Choosing the Wrong Developers Wastes Money Quickly
One restaurant owner on the Gold Coast wanted to save money and opted to use development services overseas at a price of $28 per hour versus a local price charged by Australian developers of $85-120 per hour. By the numbers, on paper, it looked like the savings could be $45,000 versus $118,000.
What actually happened is that because of the time zone differences, questions would take 2-3 days to be answered. On top of that, the overseas developers did not understand the way that Australian payment systems worked or the way that tax rules in Australia applied to the app. In the end, the restaurant owner ended up spending an estimated 190 hours doing project management and fixing mistakes. After 7 months and an amount spent of $73,000, they lost patience and ultimately decided to start over with a food delivery app development company based in Sydney in Australia. They lost their original investment of $73,000 and the value of 7 months.
A feature-packed launch will hamper your budget.
Grill’d’s app has loyalty points, nutrition information, allergy alerts, store locators, and pre-ordering capability. One café in Canberra thought it needed all of those features plus gamification, social sharing of orders, referral programs, and a meal customizer. The project took 11 months to create and cost $203,000. After going live, they looked at their analytics: of the 23 features, 89% of orders used just 4 features: menu, add item, pay, and track order status. The other 19 features that cost about $97,000 to launch were used by less than 3% of customers.
Solution: What You’ll Actually Spend
A) Your Team Structure
To build a working food ordering app in Australia, here’s the minimum realistic team:
- Project manager: 300-400 hours
- Designer: 200-280 hours
- Backend developer: 500-700 hours
- iPhone developer: 450-600 hours
- Android developer: 450-600 hours
- Testing specialist: 250-350 hours
When you hire app developers in Australia, you’re looking at $85-150 per hour, give or take skill, while and where they’re based. Sydney and Melbourne: $110-150/hour. Brisbane and Adelaide are usually $85-120/hour.
B) Backend Development: $35,000-55,000
This component is the workhorse of everything. In other words, you are writing a system that accepts orders, keeps track of stock, interfaces with payment processors, and all the data will live somewhere. A team in Melbourne building an app for a chain of 40 in-store locations spent 580 hours in this phase. That included time to specify, set up, and configure Stripe payments (85 hours), time to build a connector to their register (120 hours), architect and build an order management system (180 hours), and time to set up user login to the app (65 hours).
C) Building the Apps: $45,000-85,000
This is the customer-facing app that will appear on their phone: combined, it consists of 900-1200 hours for building both iPhone and Android apps in different codebases. If you use React Native, it will be closer to 600-800 hours, but sometimes at a performance expense. As an example, a project in Sydney achieved the same goal of completing two React Native apps within 680 hours.
D) Test Everything: $8,000-15,000
You would want to be sure that the app works as expected. This is through testing on various phones, verifying that payments work properly, confirming security, and checking that everything is visually correct. In Brisbane, a team, which is figuratively considered as 28 different people, is doing one thing only – basic testing. They commit 280 hours to this testing stage, which also involves the writing of automated tests.
E) Launching: $5,000-8,000
This includes the submission of apps to Google and Apple stores, server installation, setting up monitoring, and helping with the launch. Apple generally gives its green light within two to five days. Google usually approves requests within one to three days. Planning a budget for the instances when the app needs to be resubmitted after being rejected is a wise move.
The Actual Figures:
- Minimal version, core functionality, both phone types: From $80,000 to $110,000
- Features, loyalty program, better design, and standard version: From $130,000 to $180,000
- Complete version, a mature competitor, refined, advanced features: $200,000 – $250,000
These showcase that you hire app developers through an Android app development company. Going with freelancers might save you 20-30%, but you’ll spend that time managing the project yourself and dealing with quality issues.
It Doesn’t Stop After Launch
Monthly operating costs include:
- Servers and data delivery: $400-900
- Payment processing: 1.75-2.9% of every order
- Notifications: $200-500
- Store fees: $119/year Apple, $25 Google
- Updates and maintenance: $2,000-5,000
- Customer support: $150-400
A restaurant that records 2,500 orders a month at $28 an order pays $1,225-2,030 only in payment processing fees.
Conclusion
In Australia, you need at least $80,000 to develop a food ordering app like Grill’d and up to $250,000 for a complete system. The biggest things related to the cost are whether you’re building for one or two phone types, where you hire Android app developers, and how many features you can start with.
Hiring app developers in Australia costs more than offshore teams, but you get people in your timezone, who understand Australian laws and payment systems, and can fix problems quickly. Restaurant owners who win start with the core features that matter most, launch within 4-5 months, and add new features based on what customers actually do, not what they think.
Your first version doesn’t need to be perfect-it needs to be able to take orders consistently, process payments safely, and give customers one good reason to utilize it. If you can accomplish that, everything else will fall into place.
