Tony Illes, a deliveryman who went viral earlier this year after quitting Uber Eats and going into business for himself as “Tony Delivers” is now planning to compete directly with the big delivery apps. He’s preparing the launch of his own app, called Tony Delivers, that will have the same basic concept as DoorDash or Uber Eats — you’ll be able to order food from your phone — but with more transparency and more communication between driver and customer.
Illes made a name for himself by charging people a flat $5 fee to deliver food orders in downtown Seattle and the surrounding area at a time when complaints about the high cost of delivery were spiking. In early 2024, DoorDash and Uber Eats hiked their food delivery fees in Seattle in response to new standards on minimum wages for app workers coming into effect. Customers cut back on their delivery orders, restaurants complained about falling revenue, and members of the Seattle City Council vowed to repeal that minimum wage ordinance, known as PayUp. The repeal hasn’t happened, and DoorDash has continued to raise prices, recently tacking on a new $1.99 fee on “long-distance” orders in Seattle.
Illes’s app will ditch all those “fees” in favor of a simplified system based on Illes’s own business model, with delivery people on the platform setting how much they will charge and in what area they’ll deliver. Customers will have a menu of delivery people to choose from, each with their own prices and service area. They will pick their delivery person, then order their food. When the food arrives, the customer will pay for the delivery directly through Venmo or a similar service.
“It’s true contract work,” Illes says, unlike DoorDash and Uber Eats, which give delivery people orders with payment amounts attached that they can accept or decline. He thinks that this should make compliance with PayUp relatively simple, since if a driver is making less than the ordinance-mandated minimum wage, they can raise their prices.
This process removes a lot of the opacity involved in using an app like DoorDash, which charges customers a variety of fees and then pays drivers an amount that can fluctuate based on a number of factors including the distance the driver needs to travel and the time of day or night. But using Tony Delivers will also be less seamless (pun intended) than the brand-name apps, since customers will click through the Tony Delivers app to pay for food using Toast or a similar payment processor, then pay the driver separately.
Illes says that this has advantages for everyone. It will “unveil what the true cost of delivery is” for customers. For drivers — who Illes says will pay a fee, maybe $20 a month to start, to join the platform — the main selling point will be that they can set their own prices. Since customers pick who delivers their food, there’s a chance that driver and customer may have a better relationship than they would than when their interaction is entirely mediated by an algorithm.
About 100 drivers have told Illes they’d be interested in joining his platform, he says. At least the first batch of drivers to join the platform will be vetted and interviewed, and most of them will, like Illes, have thousands of completed deliveries for the apps. At first, all the drivers will be based in Seattle, though Illes has spoken to drivers in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles and thinks that eventually Tony Delivers could expand to other cities, tapping into a market of customers who are unhappy with the high fees of DoorDash and Uber Eats.
Illes anticipates beta testing the app soon and a full launch in October. Until then, he’s still a one-man band, continuing to take orders on his phone, Telegram, and Instagram. The fact that customers currently have to reach out to him personally was one of the motivations behind creating the app — he says that some people “want to use this service” but “feel that I can be overwhelmed” and so don’t bother him.
The app, he hopes, will let other delivery workers do what he’s done and go into business for themselves. “It will be a different system, for sure,” he says. “There will be some innovation here.”