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Get startedSearch for the best delivery app and you will get a ranked list. It will be written for one country, it will be out of date within a year, and the moment you cross a border it becomes useless.
That is the actual problem for anyone who moves. The apps do not travel with you. The one your phone is full of ratings and saved addresses for may not exist where you are going. The market you land in will have its own leaders that nobody at home has heard of.
So this is not a ranked list. It is how to work out, in a new country, which app is worth putting on your phone, and how to avoid the costs that get built into the habit.
The Market Is Regional, and That Surprises People
Food delivery looks like a global industry. It behaves like a set of regional ones.
Take one large European platform as an illustration. Its own published market list names Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Norway, Hungary, Georgia, Israel, Poland, Serbia, Greece, Azerbaijan, Slovakia, Slovenia, Kazakhstan, Cyprus, Malta, Japan, Germany, Austria and Iceland. It does not operate in the United States, and it does not operate in the Netherlands.
An American arriving in Copenhagen therefore meets a dominant local platform for the first time, while the app that dominates at home is simply absent. The reverse applies to a Finn arriving in New York.
Here is what most people want to know: does that mean starting from scratch every time? Largely yes, and that is the case for having a method rather than a favourite.
Ownership complicates the picture in a way worth knowing. DoorDash completed its acquisition of the European platform above in an all-stock transaction. That brought it to 27 countries in total, 23 of them operating under the acquired brand, with the consumer app continuing to run separately. So a brand you meet abroad may be locally dominant and globally owned. Features and pricing structures migrate between markets, which means an app you have never used may work in a familiar way. And the number of genuinely independent competitors in a city is often smaller than the number of logos suggests.
Delivery Is Not Only About Restaurants
The category has quietly stopped being about takeaway, and the useful cases are the ones people ignore.
Most major platforms now carry groceries and general retail alongside restaurants, and several operate their own delivery-only warehouses to make that work. In some markets they have gone further into over-the-counter pharmacy, though that varies country by country rather than being available everywhere.
Why does this matter more than the restaurant selection? Because the value of delivery is highest exactly when getting out is hardest. Being ill in a country whose pharmacy system you do not yet understand, in a language you do not yet speak, is the situation where an app genuinely earns its place. Ordering dinner because you cannot be bothered to cook is the situation where it quietly drains a budget.
If you are going to keep one delivery app, judge it on the first case rather than the second. That single reframing will save you more money than picking the right brand ever could.
The Subscription Question Is Where the Money Is
Every major platform now sells a membership that removes delivery fees above a minimum order. This is where your spending is actually decided, and it deserves arithmetic rather than acceptance.
The structure is consistent across the industry even when the prices are not. You pay monthly or annually. In exchange, delivery fees disappear, but only above a minimum order value, and only within a distance radius, both of which vary by whether you are ordering restaurant food, retail or groceries.
As a concrete example, the Danish tier of one major Nordic platform is published at DKK 59 per month or DKK 590 per year. Minimum orders are DKK 100 at restaurants, DKK 150 for retail and DKK 300 for groceries, inside a four to six kilometre radius depending on store type.
Three things generalise from that, whatever platform or country you are in.
The minimum order is the real term, not the headline price. A subscription that waives the fee only above the grocery minimum is not waiving it on the small top-up shop you would actually do. It is nudging you toward a larger basket, which is the point of setting it there.
The distance limit is invisible until it bites. A four-kilometre radius may exclude exactly the places you wanted, and you discover that after paying.
Annual pricing assumes a stable year. Paying twelve months up front in a country you moved to three weeks ago is a bet on habits you do not yet have.
The honest test is simple. Count how many orders you placed last month, and at what size. If the subscription only pays for itself at a frequency higher than that, it is not saving you money. It is charging you for a behaviour change.
Free Trials Are the Part to Watch
Thirty-day trials are now standard. They are useful for exactly the reason above: a month is roughly how long it takes to find out what your ordering habits in a new city really are.
The risk is worth naming plainly. A trial that removes the delivery fee for a month builds the habit at an artificial price, and the habit outlasts the trial. New-user promotions do the same thing more sharply, often waiving delivery entirely for a first week.
Two rules make trials work in your favour. Set a reminder two days before it ends, so the decision is deliberate rather than a default. And treat the trial as a measurement exercise: the question it answers is not whether free delivery is nice, which it obviously is, but how often you actually order when price is not a brake.
The Fees Nobody Reads Until Later
Delivery apps have more price components than almost anything else you buy regularly, and they are presented at different moments on purpose.
A typical order can carry five separate charges. The item prices themselves, which are often higher in the app than in the restaurant, since the venue is covering a commission. A delivery fee, which varies with distance and demand. A service fee, usually a percentage of the basket. A small-order fee below a threshold. And a surcharge at busy times, which may be described as a demand or weather adjustment.
Then a tip, where the norm differs by country and where the interface will often suggest a default.
Two habits protect you. Compare the app's menu price against the venue's own, once, for somewhere you order from regularly. The gap is frequently larger than the delivery fee, which reframes what you are actually paying for convenience. And look at the total before confirming, every time, rather than the headline item price, because the components accumulate in a way that is easy to stop noticing after the first few orders.
Neither of these is about finding a cheaper app. They are about seeing the real number, which most people stop doing within a fortnight of installing anything.
Pickup Is the Underused Option
Almost every platform offers collection alongside delivery, usually with a discount attached, and almost nobody uses it.
It is worth a thought in exactly two situations. When the venue is somewhere you would walk past anyway, on a route you are already taking, the discount is free money. And when you want the ordering convenience, browsing a menu, paying in advance, no queue, without the delivery cost, which is a genuinely different proposition from either cooking or full delivery.
For students in particular, where campus and the places you eat are often clustered together, this is the cheapest version of the convenience the app is selling. It is also the version the app promotes least, for obvious reasons.
There is a second, quieter benefit. Collecting an order puts you in the venue, which is how you find out whether somewhere is worth ordering from at all. A delivery app flattens every restaurant into the same grid of photographs and star ratings, and a city you only meet through that grid stays abstract for a very long time. Walking in occasionally is how a neighbourhood stops being a delivery radius and starts being a place you live.
What Actually Distinguishes One App From Another
Once you stop looking for a global winner, the comparison becomes tractable. Six questions, in rough order of how much they matter to someone new in a country.
Coverage at your address, not your city. Delivery radiuses are real, and a platform that dominates the centre may not reach a student area. Most publish a country and city index you can check before installing anything. Check with your own postcode before anything else, because every other consideration is irrelevant if the answer here is no.
What it delivers beyond restaurants. Groceries and pharmacy are the categories that make an app useful rather than merely convenient.
Payment methods it accepts. This catches international arrivals constantly. A foreign card may be declined outright, or may work while adding a currency conversion charge to every single order. Our bank account opening guide covers getting a local card, which usually solves both problems at once.
Language of the app and of support. Being able to order is not the same as being able to resolve a problem. A missing order, a wrong address or a refund request is where language actually matters, and that is exactly when you are least able to work around it.
Fee transparency. Whether the full total is visible before you commit, including service fees, small-order fees and any busy-period surcharge. Platforms differ considerably here, and the differences are largest when you are least attentive.
Subscription terms, judged against your own last month rather than the marketing.
Notice that price per meal is not on the list. Restaurant prices are broadly similar across platforms in a given city, and the variable that determines what you spend is how often you order, not which app you order through.
The Habit Is the Expensive Part
Worth being blunt about, because this is where delivery apps actually cost people money.
The fee, the tip and the service charge are visible and modest. The real cost is that a delivery app makes eating out the default, and eating out is expensive in a way that compounds quietly.
That gap is sharper in some countries than others. Eurostat's 2024 price levels put restaurants and hotels at 147.6 in Denmark and 140.0 in Norway against an EU average of 100, while food and non-alcoholic beverages sit at 120.2 and 131.2 respectively. The distance between those two figures is the distance between cooking and ordering, and in the Nordics it is wider than in most places.
A delivery habit that is mildly costly at home is a materially different proposition there, and the arithmetic is worth doing before the habit forms rather than after.
None of which makes delivery apps a bad idea. It makes the grocery side of them a much better idea than the restaurant side, because grocery delivery competes against a trip to the supermarket rather than against cooking at all. You are paying to avoid carrying bags, not paying a restaurant margin.
If you are building a budget from scratch after a move, our six steps to a budgeting journal is a practical way to see where the money is actually going before deciding what to cut.
College Life, the global club for young internationals, hears the same pattern from members in their first months abroad: delivery spending is rarely the thing they planned for and frequently the thing that surprised them.
A Sensible Approach for Your First Month
What to actually do, in order.
Install the two or three apps that cover your postcode. Check coverage with your real address rather than the city name, and do not commit to one yet.
Order from each once, ideally something small. You are testing the process rather than the food: how fees are presented, whether your card works, what the delivery estimate actually does, and how easy support is to reach.
Do not subscribe in the first month. You have no data on your own habits yet, and every platform will still be there in four weeks. This single rule saves more money than any comparison.
Find the grocery and pharmacy functions even if you do not need them yet. Knowing they exist before you are ill, or snowed in, or working a shift that ends after the shops close, is the entire point.
Then, at the end of the month, count. How many orders, what size, from which app. If a subscription would have paid for itself at that real frequency, buy it. If it would only pay for itself at a higher frequency, you have just avoided a recurring charge for a habit you do not have.
That sequence takes a month, costs nothing, and produces a better answer than any ranked list could. The only ranking that matters is the one measured at your own address, with your own card, at your own frequency.
If you are settling everything else at the same time, our hacks for student life cover the wider business of getting a new city working.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best food delivery app? There is no global answer, because the market is regional. The right question is which apps cover your specific address, accept your payment method, deliver groceries and pharmacy as well as restaurants, and offer support in a language you can use.
Do delivery apps work in every country? No, and this catches movers out. One of the largest European platforms operates across the Nordics and Central and Eastern Europe but not in the United States or the Netherlands. Expect to start from scratch when you move.
Are delivery subscriptions worth it? Only at a frequency you already have. Check the minimum order and the distance limit, not just the monthly price, then compare against how many orders you genuinely placed last month.
Can I use my home country's bank card? Sometimes, though it may be declined or may add a currency conversion charge to every order. A local card usually solves both and is worth sorting early.
Do delivery apps deliver more than food? Increasingly yes. Groceries and retail are common, and over-the-counter medicine has launched in some markets, though availability varies country by country rather than being universal.
How do I avoid overspending on delivery? Judge the apps on groceries rather than restaurants. Grocery delivery competes against a supermarket trip, while restaurant delivery competes against cooking, and the price gap between those two is substantial in most countries.
Why is the menu price higher in the app than in the restaurant? Because the venue is usually covering a commission to the platform, and often prices accordingly. Compare one venue you order from regularly against its own menu; the difference is frequently larger than the delivery fee, which changes what you think you are paying for.
Is pickup worth using? It is the most underused option on every platform. Where a venue sits on a route you are walking anyway, the collection discount is free money, and you still get the ordering convenience without the delivery cost.
Should I tip through the app? Norms differ sharply by country, and the interface will usually suggest a default that reflects the platform's home market rather than the one you are in. Find out the local convention rather than accepting the suggested figure, which is the same advice that applies to restaurants generally.