Jahez for Restaurants (2026): Commission, Setup & Alternatives

What Jahez Is, From the Merchant Side

Customers see an app. A restaurant owner is signing up to a listed Saudi commerce and logistics group whose accounts are public — which, unusually in this market, means you can inspect the economics of the company taking a cut of every delivered order.

Jahez International Company was founded in 2016 and listed on the Saudi Exchange in early 2022, the Kingdom's first technology startup to go public. It is not only a food delivery app. The group runs its own logistics arm, an advertising and merchant services business, cloud kitchens, quick commerce and payments investments. The practical consequence for you is structural: the commission line on your statement is one of several places this group is designed to earn from your restaurant.

The FY2025 results give you the scale: gross merchandise value of SAR 7.245 billion, up 10.8%, across 111.6 million orders at an average order value of SAR 64.9. The group's 2024 annual report described a network of more than 45,000 merchant branches and over 53,000 delivery partners serving 4.3 million active users. Whatever else is true of the competitive picture, this is a genuine second demand pool rather than a rounding error next to HungerStation.

It is also a company under real pressure, which matters to you because pressure travels down the value chain. Jahez's order count fell 6.8% year on year in Q3 2025 — against 25.6% growth before Keeta entered the market — and the group posted a net loss attributable to shareholders of SAR 9.2 million in Q1 2026 against a SAR 35.3 million profit a year earlier, even while GMV grew 39.5%. A platform buying volume at a loss is a platform with a standing reason to look harder at take rate. Read your renewal clause with that in mind.

What Jahez Actually Charges

This is the first question every operator asks, and the honest answer has two halves: what is reported, and what is verifiable. They are not the same number, and anybody quoting you a single confident percentage is guessing.

Jahez publishes no restaurant commission rate. Not on its website, not in its merchant material, not in its investor disclosures. Rates are negotiated per merchant and treated as commercially confidential — standard practice for every platform operating in the Kingdom. What circulates instead is third-party reporting: a commonly cited band of 15% to 25%, a wider 15% to 30% range attributed to variation by contract size, region and exclusivity, and claims that very high-volume chains negotiate down toward 10%. Treat every one of those as a reported range. None is a quote and none is sourced to Jahez.

There is one figure you can actually verify, and it is worth understanding precisely. Jahez's FY2025 results disclose commission revenue of SAR 1,113.8 million against GMV of SAR 7,245 million. Divide one by the other and you get a blended group take rate of roughly 15.4%. The company's own annual report put take rate at 14.6% in 2024 and 13.5% in 2023, and financial reporting on subsequent disclosures traces it to about 15.5% across the first nine months of 2025 and around 16.2% in the fourth quarter.

Now the caveats, because this number gets misused constantly. It is a group average spanning food and non-food, Saudi and non-Saudi operations, and every merchant from a national chain to a single corner bakery — the chains pull it down, so a small independent is almost certainly above it. It measures what Jahez earns per riyal of GMV, which is not identical to the commission line on your statement. And it has risen in every year on record, which the company attributes to merchant negotiations and a mix shift toward higher-value partners. The finding here is not 'Jahez charges 15%'. It is that Jahez has been extracting more per order every year and says so in its own filings.

Getting Listed — What Onboarding Actually Involves

Signing up to Jahez is a documentation exercise, not a sales conversation. With the paperwork ready it moves quickly; discovering a missing licence halfway through costs you a fortnight.

The merchant application runs through a partner portal and asks for the same things in roughly the same order every time. Your contact and business details first, then the restaurant name exactly as it appears on your legal registration, your cuisine categories, and your commercial registration number — the document that verifies you as a legitimate Saudi business. Then it goes branch by branch: physical address, trading hours and contact details for each site. Then your VAT registration number and the bank account that will receive settlements. The final stage is the menu itself, with item names, descriptions and photographed dishes.

Two things catch operators out. The first is site eligibility: applications for units inside hospitals, inside restricted or closed areas such as military zones and embassy districts, and for some mall-based units are routinely rejected, because a rider cannot reliably reach the handover point. Check this before you build a delivery menu around a site you cannot list. The second is the Balady home delivery permit, which the Ministry of Municipalities and Housing made mandatory from 1 July 2025. It requires health certificates for delivery workers, approval from the authority supervising your activity, your establishment name or trademark displayed on delivery vehicles, and vehicles meeting the relevant technical and health standards — enforced by municipal field inspection. Listing on an aggregator does not absolve you of it.

The Merchant Dashboard and Daily Operations

Jahez ships a dedicated merchant app, Jahez for Owners, and it is better than the category average. It is also the place where the platform sells things back to you.

The owner app covers a branch performance dashboard with sales, orders and growth trends per site, comparison across locations, and peak-hour and demand-pattern tracking. Alongside that sits analytics on customer behaviour and order performance, positioned as input to menu and pricing decisions, plus real-time operational visibility so a manager can read the state of the pass without standing at it. For a two- or three-branch operator this is genuinely useful: it answers questions your POS answers only if you have configured it to.

The section that deserves the most scrutiny is offers and campaigns, where you enrol in delivery offers and promotional programmes and track their impact. Jahez also sells advertising directly: sponsored placement at the top of relevant search results, ad booking with placement choice and city-level targeting, cross-promotions, loyalty-point mechanics, reach and boosting packages, and influencer activation. None of it is priced publicly. All of it comes out of the same margin as your commission. In a market where Redseer measured discount intensity climbing from 20% to 36% of gross booking value, 'optional' promotional spend has a way of becoming the price of being visible at all.

POS Integration — Take It

The highest-return decision in this entire exercise is not which platform you sign. It is refusing to run Jahez from a separate tablet on your pass.

Jahez has a dedicated integration listed in the Foodics app marketplace, available for Saudi Arabia. Deliverect also supports Jahez, injecting orders straight into your POS, pushing automatic status updates back to the platform, and syncing menus in both directions from the till rather than from an app. FeedUs and Foodizone fill the same middleware role for Saudi operators running several aggregators at once, consolidating orders from multiple platforms into a single dashboard and a single kitchen printer.

The reason this matters is unglamorous and expensive. A tablet farm on the pass means somebody re-keys orders into the till at peak, menus drift out of sync between channels, an 86'd item keeps selling for two hours, and end-of-day numbers need a spreadsheet to reconcile. Every one of those is a margin leak, and collectively they are worth more than the point or two of commission most operators spend all their negotiating energy on. Insist on integration during onboarding, not after your first bad Thursday.

Logistics, Payouts and the Contract

Three things decide whether delivery is a growth channel or a cash-flow problem: who rides the order, when you get paid, and what you signed. Only the first is meaningfully public.

Jahez runs its own logistics arm, which the group's 2024 annual report says fulfilled 42% of group orders that year while cutting cost per order by 10% to 20%. The same report described more than 53,000 delivery partners working on freelance and full-time bases. In practice that means most Jahez orders leave your kitchen on a Jahez-managed rider, and the rest go through partner capacity. Which is why the number that matters to you is not the national fleet size — it is rider availability at your specific branch, on a Thursday at eight in the evening. Ask for it before you commit a site.

Payouts are where the published record runs out. Jahez's merchant-facing material has described a weekly payment cycle, and that description is widely repeated, but the platform does not publish a settlement schedule as a contractual commitment. Cadence, cut-off day, and how refunds and cancelled orders are clawed back all live in your individual agreement. Get all four in writing. Then model what happens to your cash position if a settlement slips by a week during Ramadan volume, because that is the scenario that actually hurts.

The contract terms deserve the same scrutiny, and for the first time there is regulatory air cover for asking. Saudi Arabia's General Authority for Competition 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. The Authority has indicated a platform may be treated as dominant at or approaching 25% market share, and its study found app prices diverging from restaurants' own menu prices by roughly 20% to more than 80% depending on the item and the platform. Kuwait went further in February 2026, fixing commissions and service fees for three years and banning hidden fees, exclusivity clauses, discriminatory algorithms and preferential visibility. If exclusivity or price-parity language appears in your Jahez agreement, that is the clause to negotiate.

Where Jahez Falls Short

We would still sign Jahez before most of the alternatives. These are the six things we would slow the decision down for.

Modelling What It Actually Costs

You cannot budget a delivery channel from a commission percentage. These are the lines that actually hit your margin, what is public about each, and how to model it. We have deliberately not invented figures for the ones nobody publishes.

Every 'No' in the Published column is a finding, not a gap in our research. Jahez treats merchant commission, promotional co-funding and settlement terms as commercially confidential and negotiates them case by case. Any comparison site giving you a precise, confident figure for all five lines is telling you something it cannot know.

Once those five lines sit on one page, run the only calculation that matters: total platform deductions divided by total gross platform sales. That is your effective take rate, and it is the number you compare between channels. Operators who run it routinely land several points above the commission they thought they were paying — industry commentary puts the typical gap at three to eight points, and higher during heavy promotional periods. The percentage on your contract is where the cost begins, not where it ends.

Then handle VAT properly. Saudi Arabia's 15% VAT 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 payouts, or your input tax recovery will be understated and your filings will not reconcile to your bank. It is a boring failure mode and an expensive one to unwind twelve months later.

One structural warning on pricing. The competition regulator's study found app menu prices diverging from restaurants' own prices by roughly 20% to more than 80%, and regional regulators are moving toward enforced parity — Kuwait has already banned several of the mechanisms that make divergence profitable. If your delivery margin currently depends on charging more in the app than at your counter, that strategy has a visible expiry date. Build the channel so it works at parity.

Alternatives Worth Running Alongside It

Jahez is where we would start for most Saudi independents, and 'start' is the operative word — nobody should run a single channel. Here is how the realistic alternatives compare, with reported bands flagged as reported and published terms flagged only where they genuinely exist.

Frequently Asked Questions