How to Split a DoorDash Order with Roommates
Someone in the apartment places a group DoorDash order. The food arrives. Now you need to figure out who owes what.
The food total is simple enough. But then there's the delivery fee ($4.99), the service fee ($6.38), the small order fee ($2.00), and the driver tip ($8.00). That's $21.37 in fees on top of the food. Who pays for that?
If you split the fees evenly, the person who ordered a $9 burrito pays the same fees as the person who ordered $28 worth of sushi. That's not proportional.
The fair method: proportional fee splitting
Each person should pay fees in proportion to what they ordered. If your food is 25% of the subtotal, you pay 25% of all the fees.
Example: Four roommates, $80 food subtotal, $21.37 in total fees.
Roommate A ordered $30 in food (37.5% of subtotal). Their share of fees: $8.01. Total: $38.01.
Roommate B ordered $9 in food (11.25% of subtotal). Their share of fees: $2.40. Total: $11.40.
That's a $5.61 difference from an even fee split. Not life-changing, but multiply it across three orders a week and it's real money.
Why delivery orders are harder to split than restaurant bills
Restaurant receipts have one tax line and one tip line. Delivery receipts pile on multiple fees: delivery fee, service fee, platform fee, bag fee, small order fee, sometimes a driver tip that's separate from a service charge. Some of these fees are percentages, some are flat rates.
Most people skip the math and just split the total evenly. Or they split the food and ignore the fees, which means whoever placed the order absorbs $21 in charges.
The faster way
Divvi handles delivery receipts the same way it handles restaurant bills. Scan the DoorDash, Uber Eats, or Grubhub receipt. Every fee gets extracted and split proportionally. Each person claims their food items, and Divvi calculates their share of everything: food, tax, fees, and driver tip.
No spreadsheet. No group chat math. No one person eating $21 in fees because they happened to have the account.