I imagine it would be a matching engine that projects can apply to their own specific needs. Or are the brains of DoorDash and Uber already open source, like how most of the WWW runs on FOSS?
relevant: https://coopcycle.org/
The hardest part is getting restaurants to list themselves on the service. Worked in the restaurant industry before and during the pandemic, many restaurants despise using delivery apps, and had deliberately chosen not to, I in fact have told one DoorDash rep to fuck off specifically, because they wouldn’t stop trying to list us without our permission. They really are bloodsucking cretins, and it took the financial pressures of the pandemic to strongarm 99% of restaurants to list themselves with some sort of delivery app. Now they all do just to keep pace.
The software isn’t really the hard thing about these companies, the customer and provider UIs are nothing special and they achieve their scale using fairly industry standard event driven tools and cloud compute. They all talk a lot at industry conferences, so it’s no secret really.
Ensuring a restaurant will make the food for an order, ensuring a delivery person shows up to collect it, ensuring that food makes it to its destination in the same condition it left the restaurant, ensuring everyone gets paid at the end.
Preventing any of that from going wrong and handling it when it does is where the value of these companies lies.
Who is going to step in if a restaurant starts ignoring orders, or a driver starts eating the food, or a customer does a fraudulent chargeback?
Then there’s the money issue: where does the money go when people pay? Who owns the merchant bank account? Does every driver need a merchant bank account? How is tax accounting handled?
You can’t use cash for this system as both the driver and restaurant need to be paid (and TBF, whoever is paying for hosting the back end servers), and the driver won’t necessarily go back to that restaurant
The Application is the easiest part to build out of all of this. that’s not an issue at all. How are you going to ensure that A. Restaurants are going to want to work with you B. how are you going to get drivers to want to work for you C. how are you going to ensure that food will be safe once it leaves a restaurant until it gets to a customers door D. how are you going to ensure that everyone involved in this process gets paid.
Whose on the hook if the driver decides to eat the food that they pick up? How do you refund the customer? do you pay the Restaurant? etc, etc, etc
Basically all of the legal and safety bits. Not an impossible task I’d say but it would probably require massive seed money (in which case it will just turn into another DoorDash) or an upfront deposit nobody would be willing to pay.
Having read the other comments about the hard point is not the tech but the marketing.
My suggestion is to not use internet to advertise at all, at least at first. Advertise by having beta testers use it for free in your community. And be a delivery person yourself. Be your own first and most frequent customer, ( as well as the delivery person). Have friends and relatives use it. Deliver to them.
Always talk to businesses and users face to face, in your community.
If you mean something like self hosted, it would be really easy, but no one would use it. Imagine you order a burrito and the guy just eats your burrito, and you can’t do anything about it. Or imagine you’re a driver and you deliver the food, then don’t get paid. You need a business in between to take the liability for anyone to trust it. It being open source wouldn’t really matter, because you need massive capital and infrastructure to make it work.
Darkweb works well enough. I think you are wrong.
Massive capital only helps by lobbying and marketing.
That’s not the only thing it helps with. But you mentioned marketing, and that too is really necessary to build out a network of drivers.
Capital is also necessary to take the hit when there’s a dispute. If you can’t do that, people will have way less incentive to use your platform. It doesn’t matter if it’s open source at that point, people won’t care when they’re losing money.
I think the solution is a worker owned alternative, not just open source.
I think op is thinking of it like that and I definitely was. Or a decentralized platform.
Either of those and even an automated organization can easily have provisions for disputes.
I know that there is a libretaxi. It’s kind of like FOSS Uber but I haven’t used it myself. I’m not sure how difficult it is to build such an app. I think the difficulties usually lie in ensuring compliance with all laws, ensuring fame among users, i.e. somehow advertise. website: https://libretaxi.org/ github: https://github.com/ro31337/libretaxi
Thanks! This is just what I was looking for.
Doordash and uber eats take a 40-50% cut from the restaurant when a driver delivers the food. Other platforms take 20ish percent if the restaurant does the delivering. I’m sure you could establish some kind of self hosted network where each restaurant runs their own machine that provides some of the compute. It would have to scale really well with such a decentralized system. You’d probably have to let the restaurants individually decide the amount they want to pay the drivers, and even then it would take a long time to build up a network of drivers. I think there would be a lot more problems with a decentralized approach though as you’d now have to let restaurants figure out disputes with drivers and customers when food goes missing and things. Pros and cons, and a lot of effort.
So you want to create a human exploitation / profit maximising system?
Pretty sure those are proprietary algorithms, with some common knowledge foundations that LLMs will happily tell you about.
It’s all simple enough at a small scale, but the challenge is optimizing it for your use-cases, and building for scale & reliability in a cost efficient manner.
Such companies will likely also have top notch software engineers & statisticians, marketing teams, psychologists and lawyers on the payroll, all contributing their part to the perpetuation of human misery in the name of corporate profit.
So you want to create a human exploitation / profit maximising system?
It doesn’t have to be that way. At its core, the idea of an app that can connect people who need a service with people who can provide that service is good; it’s just the over-monetization that makes it awful.
Well agreed in the core concept, but the reality is simply put… the network infrastructure isn’t cheap. Especially factoring in things like the fact that while doordash pays it’s drivers crap… Gouges the hell out of the restraunts deeply cutting into their pockets, It’s still losing money hand over fist itself.
That all goes well until someone uses your platform for scams or CSAM… or when (as the other guy said), infra costs go up. Throw in various privacy regulations, and it can be a frustrating and costly endeavour.
There’s a sweet spot, but I fear it’s quite a small one.
You could do most of it with a website like craigslist, the hard part is managing reputations/feedback.
I really hate to say it but i suppose you could use some blockchain based system for tracking reputations… That or pgp, but realistically it seems to be a billion times easier to convince people to “use blockchain” than it is to get them to use pgp.
At this point it’s less about technology and more about network effects. If I go to an open source cloud document service it’s mainly about the tech, but if no users are on your food delivery app, no restaurants will bother using it, so no users will come.
