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How we collect prices

Last updated 6 September 2026

If you run a restaurant and found this page in your server logs, you are in the right place. The short version: we read the prices on your own pickup ordering page, once a week, slowly, and we publish the price next to the name of the dish and nothing else. If you would rather we did not, email us and we will stop.

Who we are

Counter Price is run by Siddharth Gupta in New South Wales. It is independent: no restaurant, delivery platform or ordering provider pays to be listed, and there is nothing for sale on the site. Contact sunnyday130826@gmail.com about anything on this page.

The point of the site is to let a customer see what a dish costs at your counter before they order the same dish on a delivery app. Where a delivery price is higher than the counter price, we say plainly that platforms charge venues commission of roughly 25 to 35 per cent and that many venues raise their listed prices to cover it. We do not present a higher app price as a restaurant doing anything wrong, because it is not.

What the crawler does

Our crawler identifies itself on every request:

• It requests the publicly listed pickup or takeaway ordering page that your ordering provider hosts for you. Nothing behind a login, nothing behind a checkout, no internal or undocumented interfaces.
• It waits five seconds between requests, and visits any one venue at most once a week. A whole national pass is a few hundred page views spread over an hour or more, which is less traffic than a single customer browsing your menu.
• It reads the page once and does not follow links, submit forms or place orders.
• It obeys robots.txt.

What we record, and what we leave behind

For each item we keep the name, any size or variant, the category heading it sits under, and the price, along with the date we saw it. That is the whole record.

We deliberately do not store your menu descriptions, your photographs, your logo, or any other text you wrote. Those are yours, and there is no column in our database to put them in. What we keep is a list of facts about prices, which is the part that is useful to a customer and the part nobody owns.

Prices are appended, never overwritten. When a price changes we add the new observation and keep the old one, so the record shows what a dish cost over time rather than only what it costs today. Today we hold 66,014 current prices from 758 restaurants.

Where a counter price never comes from

We never take a counter price from DoorDash, Uber Eats, Menulog, or from a third-party directory that republishes menus. A counter price on this site comes from the restaurant’s own menu, either its own pickup ordering page or a photograph taken in store. If we cannot get it from you, we do not publish it.

Delivery figures shown next to a counter price are labelled as estimates and are modelled from markups measured on real receipts that customers send us. They are not measurements of your venue, and each one is replaced the moment somebody sends a receipt for that item.

If a price is wrong

Menus change and parsers make mistakes. If something on your page is wrong, email us with the venue name and we will correct it, usually the same day. We would much rather be told than be wrong quietly.

Two known limits worth naming. Where a menu prices a dish by choice of protein or size, we may show only the base price; those items are labelled “base price, options extra”. And a price carries the date we last saw it, so a very recent change may not have reached us yet.

How to be removed

Email sunnyday130826@gmail.com from an address at your venue’s domain, or from the address listed on your ordering page, and say which venue. We will remove it and stop crawling it. You do not need to give a reason and we will not argue with you about it.

You can also block the crawler yourself by adding this to your robots.txt, and it will stop on its next visit:

Why we think this is fair

A price is a fact, and a list of prices is not a creative work. Australian courts have been clear that a compilation which is the product of effort rather than authorship does not attract copyright, in IceTV Pty Ltd v Nine Network Australia Pty Ltd (2009) and Telstra Corporation Ltd v Phone Directories Company Pty Ltd (2010). We rely on that, which is also why we take the numbers and leave the words you wrote.

Beyond the law, the practical case: a customer who can see that your counter price is lower than the app price is a customer more likely to walk in or ring you directly, on an order where you keep the whole amount instead of a commissioned share of it.

Counter Price is not affiliated with DoorDash, Uber Eats, Menulog, or any ordering platform or restaurant. Prices change, and the ones here carry the date we last saw them. Always check with the restaurant directly.