Building Eddy: The Kayak for Food Delivery That Nobody Asked For (But Everyone Needs)
We built a Chrome extension and website that compares food delivery prices across DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub. 13,963 restaurants. 30 cities. Here's the story.
You know that feeling when you're hungry, you open three delivery apps, and you realize the same pad thai is $14.99 on DoorDash, $16.49 on Uber Eats, and $13.99 on Grubhub? And then there's the delivery fee, the service fee, the "we're sorry for existing" fee?
Yeah. We got tired of that too.
The Problem Nobody Talks About
Food delivery is a $350 billion global market, and every platform charges different prices for the same food from the same restaurant. The markup varies wildly — sometimes 15%, sometimes 40%. And the fees? A labyrinth designed by someone who clearly failed their UX class.
Kayak solved this for flights. Nobody had solved it for food.
What We Built
Eddy is two things:
1. A Chrome Extension that overlays price comparisons directly on DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub. When you're browsing a restaurant, Eddy shows you what it costs on the other platforms — and whether you can order directly from the restaurant (spoiler: you usually can, and it's cheaper).
2. A Website (eddy.delivery) with a searchable database of 13,963 restaurants across 30 metro areas. Every listing shows which delivery platforms carry it, estimated prices, and — this is the key part — a direct ordering link when available.
The Direct Ordering Play
Here's the thing most people don't realize: many restaurants have their own ordering systems. They use Square, Toast, ChowNow, or their own website. When you order direct, the restaurant keeps 100% of the revenue instead of paying 15-30% to DoorDash.
Eddy surfaces these direct ordering links. Out of 13,963 restaurants in our database, 12,091 have direct ordering URLs. That's 87%.
The pitch to consumers: save money. The pitch to restaurants: we send you customers who order direct. Win-win, no middleman fees.
Technical Stack
- **Extension**: Manifest V3 Chrome extension with content scripts that detect restaurant pages
- **Website**: Next.js on Coolify, server-rendered for SEO
- **Data**: Static dataset (top-restaurants.ts) compiled from public APIs and manual verification
- **Revenue**: Featured restaurant listings at $29/mo (basic) and $99/mo (premium)
The Overlay Problem
The trickiest engineering challenge was the overlay. When a user visits a DoorDash restaurant page, Eddy needs to: 1. Detect which restaurant they're viewing 2. Match it against our database 3. Show a non-intrusive comparison overlay 4. Re-show it when they navigate (SPA detection — DoorDash doesn't do full page loads)
Version 0.5.0 had a bug where the overlay would show once and then disappear for 24 hours. Users thought the extension was broken. In v0.5.1, we fixed it to re-show after 30 minutes and added proper SPA navigation detection via MutationObserver.
Traction So Far
- Published on Chrome Web Store (v0.5.1 pending review)
- eddy.delivery indexed by Google, 43 pages crawling
- Reddit post on r/UTAustin: 2,700 views (score: 0 — we learned that Reddit hates self-promotion)
- 30 metro pages for SEO (Austin, NYC, LA, Chicago, etc.)
What's Next
- Mobile PWA (no native app yet — proving demand first)
- Real-time price fetching via delivery platform APIs
- Restaurant analytics dashboard (show restaurants how many clicks they get)
- Affiliate revenue from delivery platforms
The Honest Take
Eddy is a consumer play in a market dominated by well-funded incumbents. The moat is thin — any of the delivery apps could build this. But they won't, because showing price comparisons would expose their markup game. That's the wedge.
The direct ordering angle is the real business. If we can drive enough volume to restaurants' own ordering systems, we become the anti-DoorDash — and restaurants will pay for that.
Is it a venture-scale business? Probably not. Is it a solid, revenue-generating product that solves a real problem? Absolutely. And sometimes that's enough.