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Ask HN: What stops open source UberEats alternatives from popping up everywhere?

by aster0id on 9/9/24, 9:46 PM with 5 comments

I am aware that it takes a lot of marketing these days to get a consumer app off the ground. But from my very limited knowledge of how these things work, restaurants are incentivized to get on the cheapest delivery platform possible, and also to promote it to increase their own revenue, so in my mind you only need to convince a critical mass of restaurants for the dominos to start falling. Starting with neighborhood restaurants and then progressively moving outwards seems like a good strategy here.

The core software itself doesn't seem too hard to build, except that some real time features like the ETA are clearly only possible if you have massive amounts of data. Yet a simple version where orders are dispatched to a pool of drivers should be relatively easy to put together.

Restaurants can offer items for cheaper than in-store prices because online orders don't have real estate overheads (except for maybe the kitchen), and our fees will be very low / a flat rate. Cheaper food should incentivize users to accept a lower quality UX.

Drivers can be paid more than Uber eats because a small open source project should not have the same insane R&D overheads that uber has.

The only thing I can think of is that if you get big enough, Uber eats / doordash will either try to stomp you out or buy you.

  • by tb8424 on 9/11/24, 2:30 PM

    When a company like Uber takes a cut from the driver, a part of that money is used to pay for the people that work for the app, but there are a lot of non-technical useful roles that keep the wheels turning: support functions like customer support / incidents / legal and onboarding teams make sure that the drivers and clients are safe and that they are not breaking any laws.

    Liability is a second thing. Cost is one of the factors that might make people swing to other apps, but you also want an experience that is legal and safe, and at Uber's scale it takes quite a lot of people to synchronise this, as the liability for things like that belong to Uber and not the driver.

  • by leros on 9/10/24, 1:58 PM

    You underestimate how difficult the marketing is to get something like this going. These apps are two-sided or even three-sided marketplaces where you can't attract one side without already having the others.

    Why would a restaurant use some random new app that has no customers on it when UberEats and Doordash already dominate the market? Would would a consumer order through a new app with only a few restaurants when Uber Eats already has all the restaurants on it and they're already using it anyway. Why would a driver sign up for yet another gig work app when it doesn't even have any work on it yet?

    Even with loads of VC money to incentivize getting that going, it's still a very difficult battle, especially now that a few players have already become dominant.

  • by sfmz on 9/9/24, 10:32 PM

    The wages aren't very good for the driver to begin with, and your nacent UberEats-clone won't have enough restaurant-orders in the network to sustain wages, so the entire outfit needs to be subsidized by VC money to get the ball rolling and achieve critical mass.

    Uber lost money ever year until 2024:

    "Well, it only took 15 years, but better late than never. For the first time in its history, Uber ended the year having made more money than it spent on its ridehailing and delivery operations"

    https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/8/24065999/uber-earnings-pro...

  • by floxy on 9/10/24, 12:07 AM

    Seems like food delivery might be the killer app for drone deliveries. You need to get it there fast. Fairly bounded load weights / sizes. Hardware/Drones should scale. Could do mostly automated deliveries, with human intervention handled by a call center somewhere. That seems more likely to be a profitable use-case than Amazon drone deliveries for your pencils or whatever. Does Dominoes have a team working on drone pizza delivery?

  • by t0md4n on 9/9/24, 10:09 PM

    License to operate? Idk how it works for food service but with the taxi service I think they need permission to operate, not completely sure though.