The lockdown induced by the Covid-19 pandemic has led to many restaurants going out of business due to a huge loss of revenues. This was the result of the need for maintaining social distancing norms to slow down the spread of the virus which eventually led to an increase in the other restaurant business model i.e. Restaurants Food delivery with the help of on-demand food delivery apps.

If you are looking for the development cost of an on-demand food delivery app then the first thing to look into is to find the customer's expectations which the present market players are not able to fulfill completely. The user expectations from a food delivery app or business are briefly explained below

1. Healthy and delicious Food Options

For a food delivery app, the major customer expectations to fulfill is to cover all sorts of audience within it. Different people crave different foods so it is required to register multiple restaurants within the app and also offer advanced search and filter options so the user could find their favorite food and the restaurant easily.

2. Customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is important for user engagement and making the customer visit the app more often. The features that could add to customer satisfaction are no contact deliveries, an Electronic payment system with multiple options, Updating customers of the order status, order scheduling.

3. Create a Brand Image

There are multiple ways to create a brand image of the business in the minds of the customers and the most common and efficient in a food delivery business is using packaging with the brand's logo on it and by making it more attractive. For the delivery of hot food use packaging material that will keep the food inside the box at a good temperature.

4. Brand Visibility

For the growth of the business, it is important to market the product to your audience. If your target audience doesn’t know about your product then how will your business or users grow. To increase brand visibility a company can offer a referral program as it is the most successful in recent times.

5. Food Delivery Experience

There are multiple ways a company can improve the food delivery experience of the user and some of that surely involves internal food inventory management as it will help the restaurant deliver the food to the user before the expected delivery time. Also updating the user on every step like order acceptance, order pickup, expected delivery time, etc. So updating the user on every step makes the user feel in control of the delivery which improves the overall delivery experience.

6. Continuous Improvement

The advancement in technology has led to increased user expectations. So the user expects a continuous improvement in the overall experience so it is necessary for the app to work towards it.

Fulfilling the above user expectations needs some advanced features within the app and to fulfill that advanced feature requires advanced technology backend so considering India as our app development country the approximate cost to develop an on-demand food delivery app would be between $5,000 - $30K depending on the parameters selection.