HungerStation vs Jahez (2026): Which Delivery Platform for Your Restaurant

Two Different Kinds of Company

The apps look similar on a phone. Behind them sit two very different businesses — one a Saudi-listed group whose economics you can read line by line, the other a national champion owned by a global operator that is itself being bought.

HungerStation started in the Eastern Province and was absorbed into Delivery Hero, which took full ownership and has run it as its Saudi platform ever since. Reported figures for 2025 put it above 100 Saudi cities, more than 55,000 restaurant and store partners, roughly 40 million app downloads and revenue near 709 million dollars, with EBIT above 57 million dollars — which, in a category where almost nobody makes money, is unusual and matters to you. A profitable platform has less reason to buy share with subsidies and more reason to defend its take rate.

Jahez is the opposite kind of counterparty. It listed on the Saudi Exchange in 2022 and files public accounts, so its FY2025 numbers are inspectable: SAR 7.245 billion of GMV across 111.6 million orders at an average order value of SAR 64.9, spread over 100 Saudi cities plus Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait. It also runs its own logistics arm, cloud kitchens, an advertising business and a POS company. That transparency is genuinely useful when you are negotiating — you can read what the counterparty earns before you agree what it takes from you.

The pressure sits in different places. Jahez reported orders down 6.8% year on year in Q3 2025 after Keeta entered the market, and swung to a net loss attributable to shareholders of SAR 9.2 million in Q1 2026 against a SAR 35.3 million profit a year earlier. HungerStation grew Saudi order volume by more than 20% in 2025 and made money doing it. For a restaurant, that asymmetry cuts both ways: the platform under pressure is the one with a reason to negotiate, and the profitable one is the one with a reason not to.

What Each One Charges

This is the question that decides the article, and the honest answer is that neither company will tell you. What follows separates what is reported from what is verifiable, and flags every line where the published record simply runs out.

Neither HungerStation nor Jahez publishes a restaurant commission rate. Not on their merchant sites, not in their partner material, not in investor disclosure. Rates are negotiated per merchant, vary by city, category, volume and contract length, and are treated as commercially confidential. What circulates instead is third-party reporting, and it is consistent on direction if not on precision: HungerStation is placed in a 20% to 30% band, with some write-ups citing 25% to 35% once service and processing fees are bundled in, while Jahez is reported in a 15% to 25% band that widens to 30% in some contracts. Operators we have spoken to describe the same ordering — HungerStation dearer, Jahez cheaper — without agreeing on the gap.

There is exactly one audited number in this comparison, and it belongs to Jahez. Its FY2025 accounts disclose commission revenue of SAR 1,113.8 million against GMV of SAR 7,245 million, which divides out to a blended group take rate of roughly 15.4%. Read that carefully before you use it. It is a group average spanning food and non-food, Saudi and non-Saudi, national chains and single-site bakeries — the chains pull it down, so an independent is almost certainly above it. It is also rising: the company's own reporting put take rate at 13.5% in 2023 and 14.6% in 2024. HungerStation, consolidated inside Delivery Hero's MENA segment, publishes no equivalent figure at all, which means the cheaper-looking platform is also the only one you can check.

The table below is the honest version of a pricing comparison. Every row marked as unpublished is a finding rather than a gap in our research: both platforms treat these terms as confidential and negotiate them case by case.

Reach: Whose Customers Are They?

Commission decides your margin per order. Reach decides how many orders there are to take a margin on. This is where the two platforms genuinely diverge, and where the published numbers are least trustworthy.

Start with the uncomfortable part: the market share figures for Saudi food delivery contradict each other. Redseer-based reporting through 2025 placed HungerStation at around 50% in major cities, Jahez at 30% to 33% and Keeta at 10% to 11%. Reporting around the Uber transaction put HungerStation near 40% by the end of 2025, Keeta near 33% and Jahez above 20%. A separate 2024 figure had Jahez taking roughly a third of all Saudi delivery orders — but that counts groceries and parcels alongside food, which is a different market. These are not all measuring the same thing, and none of them is measuring your street.

What survives the disagreement is the ranking and the geography. Every serious source has HungerStation first in food delivery nationally, Jahez a real second, and Keeta growing fast enough that both incumbents are now defending rather than expanding. HungerStation's advantage is deepest in the Western Province and in secondary cities where it has been the default app for a decade. Jahez indexes stronger in Riyadh and the central region and carries genuine weight in the Eastern Province, which is where a Jahez-led strategy is most defensible.

There is a second-order point buried in those numbers that matters more than the ranking. Keeta taking somewhere between a tenth and a third of the market inside two years means both incumbents lost share to a subsidised entrant, and both are now spending to hold position. For a restaurant that is temporary good news — three funded platforms competing for the same diner is the most negotiating leverage independents have had in this market — and a reason not to lock the leverage away in a long exclusive term.

Subscriptions, Promotions and the Discount War

The commission percentage is the part of the cost you can see. The part that actually moves your margin is what happens to the order price before commission is applied — and this is the dimension on which the two platforms are least alike.

HungerStation's structural advantage is HungerStation Pro. Reported subscription penetration reached 61% of Saudi GMV, the highest anywhere in the Delivery Hero group, on a base of more than 10 million subscribers. For a restaurant that cuts two ways. A majority of the orders reaching you come from customers who have already paid for free delivery and therefore order more often and hesitate less at checkout, which is real incremental volume. It also means the platform, not you, owns the reason those customers order at all. When a subscriber chooses dinner, they are choosing inside an app they have already paid to use.

Jahez has pushed subscriptions too, and both incumbents leaned on loyalty programmes through 2025 while Keeta bought new users outright with sign-up vouchers, half-price first orders and waived delivery fees. That is the context for the number every Saudi operator should have memorised: Redseer put discount intensity across the market at 36% of gross booking value, up from 20%, and identified independent restaurants as disproportionately exposed because of weak negotiating power, co-funding expectations and dependence on in-app visibility.

Neither platform publishes what it expects you to contribute. Both sell promotional participation and paid placement, both link visibility to participation, and both quote per campaign. The practical defence is arithmetic rather than negotiation: track promotional co-funding and advertising as separate lines from day one, then divide total platform deductions by total gross platform sales to get your real effective take rate per channel. Operators who run that calculation routinely land several points above the commission they believed they were paying.

POS Integration and Who Controls the Menu

The highest-return decision in this comparison is not which app you sign. It is refusing to run either of them from a separate tablet on your pass — and here the two platforms are not equally easy to wire up.

Jahez has a dedicated integration listed in the Foodics app marketplace for Saudi Arabia, which for the large share of Saudi restaurants already running Foodics is the shortest path from order to kitchen printer. HungerStation reaches the same POS by a different route: Deliverect supports HungerStation with order injection, automatic status updates back to the platform and two-way menu sync, and Deliverect in turn has a two-way integration with Foodics. FeedUs and Foodizone fill the same middleware role for Saudi operators consolidating several aggregators into one dashboard, and Restroworks lists HungerStation as well.

The practical difference is a layer, not a wall. With Jahez you can be direct into Foodics; with HungerStation you will generally be paying a middleware vendor to sit in between. That is a third supplier with its own monthly fee, and you should price it into the HungerStation channel rather than treating integration as free. It also means one more system to test before go-live: 86 an item, change a modifier group, and watch whether both channels update before you trust it on a Thursday night.

Whichever route you take, the alternative is worse than the fee. A tablet farm on the pass means somebody re-keys orders into the till at peak, four menus drift out of sync, a sold-out item keeps selling for two hours, and end-of-day needs a spreadsheet to reconcile. Every one of those is a margin leak, and collectively they are worth more than the two or three points of commission most operators spend their negotiating energy on.

Payouts, Contracts and Cash Flow

Three things decide whether delivery is a growth channel or a cash-flow problem: when you get paid, what gets deducted before you are, and what you signed. On this dimension both platforms are equally opaque, which is itself the finding.

Neither company publishes a contractual settlement schedule. HungerStation onboards merchants through a seller portal with a dedicated account manager and takes bank details during registration, but cadence, cut-off day and clawback policy live in the agreement rather than in public terms. Jahez merchant material has described a weekly payment cycle and that description is widely repeated, though it is not published as a contractual commitment either. Get the cadence, the cut-off day, the refund clawback mechanism and the dispute process in writing from both, then model what a one-week slip does to your payroll date.

The contract terms deserve the same scrutiny, and for the first time there is regulatory cover for asking. Saudi Arabia's General Authority for Competition has put a draft guideline for the food delivery platform sector out for public consultation on the Istitlaa platform, targeting predatory or below-cost pricing, discrimination between sellers, exclusive contracts between platforms and restaurants, and self-preferencing. If either agreement in front of you contains exclusivity or price-parity language, that is the moment to negotiate rather than the moment to sign.

One more thing belongs in your cash-flow model. Saudi VAT at 15% applies to the order, and the platform's commission invoice to you is itself a taxable supply. Your accountant needs the platform statements, not merely the net amounts that land in the bank, or your input tax recovery will be understated and your filings will not reconcile. It is a boring failure mode and an expensive one to unwind a year later — and it doubles in nuisance value the moment you are running both platforms.

Who Owns the Customer

Commission is recoverable. You can price around it, renegotiate it, or drop the channel. The customer relationship is the thing you do not get back, and it is the dimension almost nobody models before signing.

Both platforms sit between you and the diner by design. You receive order-level data for your own outlets and analytics on your own performance inside their tools, and you do not receive the customer. The name, the phone number, the ordering history and the marketing permission belong to the app. That is why the aggregator channel gets described as rented demand: it works, it scales faster than anything you could build, and it stops the moment you stop paying for it. HungerStation's subscription base makes this sharper rather than softer — a Pro subscriber is loyal to the subscription, not to your kitchen.

There is a related pricing trap. The competition regulator's study found app menu prices diverging from restaurants' own prices by roughly 20% to more than 80%, and regulators across the Gulf are now moving toward enforced parity, with Kuwait already banning several of the mechanisms that make divergence profitable. If your delivery margin currently depends on charging materially more in the app than at your counter, that margin has a regulatory expiry date attached and should not be the basis of a multi-year plan.

Six Things That Should Slow the Decision

We would run both platforms for most Saudi independents. These are the six issues we would resolve before signing either agreement.

Head to Head, and What Else Belongs on the Pass

Here is the comparison reduced to the six dimensions that actually change a decision, followed by the channels that should sit alongside whichever platform you pick. Reported figures are flagged as reported; published terms are flagged only where they genuinely exist.

Frequently Asked Questions