Restaurant owners in Bengaluru had a date circled: August 15, the day they said they'd stop taking orders through Swiggy and Zomato altogether. Their complaint wasn't new — commissions running as high as 25% to 35% per order, plus discounts, advertising fees and payout deductions the platforms levy on top, squeezing margins that were already thin. The boycott didn't happen on schedule. It's been pushed to August 31.
That gap between "threatened" and "delayed" is the actual story, because of what showed up in the same city in the same window.
This isn't the first time restaurants have tried this
Bengaluru's threat sits on top of a fight that's run for years without resolving. In August 2019, hundreds of outlets under the National Restaurant Association of India ran a campaign called "Logout," with roughly 2,500 restaurants pulling out of Zomato Gold over the deep discounting the programme forced onto their margins. That grievance escalated in 2021 into a formal complaint to the Competition Commission of India, alleging exorbitant commissions, delayed payouts, one-sided contracts and platforms quietly running their own cloud kitchens in competition with the restaurants listed on them. The CCI ordered a full antitrust investigation in 2022 and found a prima facie case on three of the eight charges. None of it changed the commission structure restaurants are objecting to again now. A boycott threat in 2026 is, in that sense, the same complaint restaurants have been making since 2019 — just with a new deadline attached.
What changed this time is that there's somewhere else to go
Flipkart launched its own food delivery app in Bengaluru this month, reportedly charging around 10% commission — roughly a third of what Swiggy and Zomato take at the high end of their 25–35% range. For a restaurant running on single-digit margins, that's not a marginal difference; it changes whether a delivery order is worth fulfilling at all. On a ₹500 order, a 30% commission leaves the restaurant ₹350 before its own food and packaging cost; a 10% commission leaves ₹450 — a gap of ₹100 per order that, multiplied across a few hundred orders a month, is the difference between a delivery channel that subsidises a restaurant's rent and one that barely covers it.
Flipkart isn't the only newer option, either. Rapido's Ownly platform, running in Bengaluru since earlier this year, has gone further than undercutting the percentage — it's dropped the commission model altogether in favour of a flat per-order fee, reported at around ₹25 plus GST, with the platform's delivery cost recovered instead through a flat fee charged to the customer. That's a structurally different bet: instead of taking a cut that scales with a restaurant's order value, Ownly is betting it can sustain itself on volume and a fixed fee regardless of what any individual order is worth. It has already grown its restaurant network into the tens of thousands through a partnership with the discovery platform magicpin.
| Swiggy / Zomato | Flipkart (new entrant) | Rapido Ownly | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fee model | 25–35% commission | ~10% commission | Flat ~₹25/order + GST |
| City status | Established, dominant order volume | Just launched in Bengaluru | Live since early 2026, expanding |
| What it changes for a restaurant | Fee scales with order size | Fee still scales, but far less | Fee is fixed regardless of order value |
Why the boycott moved instead of happening
A restaurant collective threatening to walk away from its two biggest order sources needs somewhere for those orders to actually go — and a year ago, the credible alternatives were smaller platforms without the logistics network or customer base to absorb that volume. That's no longer entirely true. Between Flipkart's low commission and Ownly's flat-fee model, Bengaluru's restaurants have, for the first time since the 2019 Logout campaign, options with real scale behind them rather than just a grievance and a hashtag. That's almost certainly why the deadline moved rather than the orders stopping: a boycott threat backed by a genuine alternative is leverage in a negotiation. A boycott threat with nowhere for the volume to go is just a statement.
The incumbents aren't standing still either
Swiggy's own response has leaned toward volume rather than commission cuts: its 99 Store — a value-format storefront carrying items from Burger King, McDonald's, KFC, Domino's and Taco Bell alongside regional brands — has expanded past 500 cities, with monthly orders through it up roughly 2.4 times over the past year. That's a different lever than the one restaurants are pulling on. Restaurants want lower commissions on the orders they already fulfil; Swiggy is betting that growing the total order pool matters more to its business than what it charges on the margin of any single one.
Whether that's enough to hold the restaurant coalition together past August 31 is genuinely unresolved, and the 2019–2022 history is not encouraging for restaurants expecting a fast resolution — the Logout campaign and the CCI complaint that followed it took years to produce even a partial finding, and the underlying commission structure barely moved. What's different this time is that "keep taking Swiggy and Zomato's terms or stop delivering online" is no longer the only choice on the table in Bengaluru. Whether that's enough to finally move the incumbents' terms, rather than just delay a deadline again, is what the next two weeks will actually test.
