Bites lets diners order in ChatGPT straight to the restaurant, skipping DoorDash's cut

An AI-native food ordering layer: orders placed in ChatGPT go straight to the restaurant's point of sale for a flat $1 surcharge.

That diners who already know where they want to eat will order through LLMs directly to the restaurant, killing the 15–30% commission middleman.

Bala Subramaniam, previously of Instacart, and Matt Maloney, who co-founded Grubhub, built Bites on the argument that delivery platforms' commissions are a relic of the era when they had to build ordering infrastructure from scratch.

In August 2026 DoorDash sent Bay Area restaurants a form email warning they may be listed on Bites without consent and that such practices 'could be illegal'; Bites says 14 partners forwarded it, some unlisted restaurants then asked to join, and some listed ones — from old demos — asked to leave. The Verge ordered the same pizza through Bites in ChatGPT for $56.73 and through DoorDash for $70.29. DoorDash, which processed 970 million orders for $4.5B in Q2 2026, is itself building iMessage text-to-order.

It attacks the model, not the app: restaurants raise menu prices to cover commissions, so bypassing the platform fixes prices and margins at once.

POS integration is the shortcut — menus and orders flow through Toast and Square instead of a new marketplace.

It concedes discovery to DoorDash on purpose: 'if you know where you want to eat, we will get you to the place that you want to eat, with the best pricing.'

Restaurants get the customer data platforms withhold — direct contact enables loyalty, support and discounts.

When agents do the ordering, discovery — the platform's real product — stops being the bottleneck, and the commission that funded it looks like pure tax.

As of 7 October 2026, Bites content from the rides of its restaurant roster was still rolling out; DoorDash said 'no action was needed' for partners who had opted in, and was building its own iMessage ordering agent. The Verge noted the fight was part of a wider pattern, alongside Amazon's lawsuit against Perplexity over agent shopping.