The Franchise Ladder: Per-Location Pricing

A chain’s ordering bill should fall per site as the chain grows, and it should do so on a schedule that is published rather than negotiated. That is the whole design of Devfood’s location ladder. This post sets the ladder out, explains what a franchise actually gets per outlet, and works the bill for a twelve-site chain in four currencies.

The ladder

In the United States the subscription is $79 per location per month for one to three locations. It is $69 from your fourth location and $59 from your tenth — and it is the whole account that moves, not just the new site. The day your fourth outlet opens, the first three are billed at the 4–9 rate too.

Every published market has its own row set against its own category leader (see why ordering software should not be priced by exchange rate). The same three-step shape applies in every one of them:

Market	1–3 locations	4–9 locations	10+ locations
United States	$79	$69	$59
India	₹2,100	₹1,800	₹1,575
Brazil	R$149	R$127	R$112
Philippines	₱1,156	₱982	₱867

Each figure is a month, for each location. Orders are unlimited at every step and carry no commission, so a busy outlet costs the same as a quiet one.

Billing terms are the same at every size. On monthly billing there is a one-time $299 setup fee covering app-store publishing under your brand, domain and SSL, menu import and go-live QA. Pay annually and setup is included, and you pay for ten months and get twelve.

What a franchise gets per outlet

Per-location pricing only makes sense if the outlet is a real unit in the product rather than a line on an invoice. It is, and these are the pieces a franchise operator uses:

A central menu with per-outlet overrides. Head office pushes the menu; each outlet can override prices with its own price book, adjust hours, and mark items sold out without touching anyone else’s menu. A new outlet starts from a copy of an existing one.

Franchise, zone and owner roles. Staff permissions are per outlet, and there are franchise-level and zone-level roles above them, so a regional manager sees their region and a franchisee sees their sites. The per-outlet access boundary is described on the security page: one outlet’s staff cannot read another’s orders or customers.

Per-outlet earnings. Earnings reports break out by outlet, so a franchisor settling with franchisees has the figures per site without a spreadsheet. Consolidated reporting rolls the whole network up, and the 75+ built-in reports export to CSV.

Location-based ordering and routing. The customer app routes an order to the right outlet by the customer’s location and each outlet’s delivery zones, and each outlet dispatches its own drivers — or draws on a shared pool assigned to several outlets.

Per-site devices. A single-use eight-character code enrols a printer, kiosk, register or kitchen screen to one outlet; staff sign in on PINs; a device can be deactivated remotely when a site closes or changes hands.

One brand runs across all of it — one set of colours, one app name, one loyalty wallet a customer can use at any outlet, one voucher campaign that applies network-wide or to one region.

Twelve sites, worked

A twelve-outlet chain is on the 10+ rate for every outlet.

Market	Monthly bill for 12 locations	Annual prepay (10 months)
United States	12 × $59 = $708	$7,080
India	12 × ₹1,575 = ₹18,900	₹189,000
Brazil	12 × R$112 = R$1,344	R$13,440
Philippines	12 × ₱867 = ₱10,404	₱104,040

Set that against a percentage model. A chain of that size doing, say, ₹4 lakh a month of marketplace orders per outlet at a 20% effective rate remits ₹80,000 a month per outlet — ₹9.6 lakh across the network — for the ordering channel alone. Moving a fifth of that volume to a direct channel that costs ₹18,900 for the whole network is not a close call, and the Indian break-even walks through the division if you want to replace the assumption with your own statement.

Why the whole account reprices

Two reasons, and both are about keeping the price a price rather than a negotiation.

First, the alternative — new sites at the lower rate, old sites at the old one — produces an invoice with three different unit prices on it and a franchisee asking why their site costs more than the one that opened last month. A single rate per account is legible to everyone who reads the bill.

Second, the ladder exists because a ten-outlet group takes roughly ten times the value out of the platform a single café does, and pays for it, but not ten times the price of the first outlet. The published steps are how that is expressed, and a step that applied only to marginal sites would understate it.

What the ladder does not do is discount below its own bottom step. The 10+ rate is the 10+ rate at twelve outlets and at forty; there is no further tier to ask for, and no price that is only real until you ask for a discount.

What counts as a location, for a chain

One physical outlet that takes orders. Three kitchens under one brand are three locations; a commissary preparing for the outlets, which takes no orders itself, is not one. Several counters under one roof, each taking its own orders, each count. The cloud-kitchen post works through the edge cases.

Franchising in a value market

The ladder was built for markets where a dollar price would have been the wrong price. A twelve-site chain in Brazil pays R$1,344 a month for the whole network, with native iOS and Android apps under its own brand included and multi-language storefronts included, on the same single plan a Toronto chain is on. The counter hardware — register, kitchen display, kiosk, loyalty tablet — is optional at every site and quoted separately, so a delivery-led franchise never pays for a kiosk it does not run.

The pricing page has every published market’s row. If your network spans more than one, each outlet is billed in its own market’s row, and a demo on a live multi-outlet store is the fastest way to see the roles and the per-outlet menus working before you commit a single site.