BENGALURU: Rapido is rolling out its food delivery service with a different pricing structure from entrenched players, choosing flat fees over commissions charged to restaurants. The move positions the ride-hailing firm as a challenger to Zomato and Swiggy at a time when small restaurant owners are increasingly vocal about rising aggregator costs.According to people familiar with the development, Rapido plans to charge a fixed Rs 25 on food orders below Rs 400 and Rs 50 for those above. These charges are flat fees deducted from the order value, paid by the restaurant to Rapido. While some reports attempted to interpret these as equivalent to a commission range of 8%-15%, people aware of the model clarified that Rapido did not structure its pricing as a percentage-based commission.“The plan is to study how Rapido is able to pull it off operationally in a handful of pincodes in Bengaluru and then scale it from then on. It is at an extremely experimental stage right now,” said one of the persons cited above. Notably, Swiggy or Zomato charges anything from the range of 16-30% from order values of restaurants on its platforms.“Delivery takes the same cost for the restaurant aggregator for customers in an assigned distance. As the market matures, it only makes sense to bring parity to these prices so that restaurant businesses do not suffer. Today’s users are not using a Zomato or Swiggy for discoverability anymore; gone are those days. They are using it for ordering from known and trusted restaurants,” another person familiar with Rapido’s plans told TOI.A pilot, set for late June in Bengaluru, follows months of talks with the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI). “There is scope to make food delivery much cheaper. Aggregators act less as partners but more as transactional merchants. Rapido took our suggestions and implemented this pricing strategy after months of on-ground conversations with restaurants,” NRAI President Sagar Daryani told TOI.Unlike incumbent platforms that often bundle in ad spends and additional service charges, Rapido’s model is being positioned as a leaner and more predictable alternative, particularly attractive to small and mid-sized restaurants. Several such restaurants recently took to social media to express frustration over Zomato’s and Swiggy’s economics over the past many months.Rapido did not respond to a request for comment. For now, its bike-taxi fleet continues to support Swiggy deliveries on a non-exclusive basis in select cities.