Menu prices at Kotipizza don't move. The delivery fee does. Every five minutes, Priceff recalculates the fee based on how much delivery demand a restaurant is seeing right now, moving it within a band of roughly €2.90 to €7.90. It runs lower on a quiet Monday and higher on a busy Friday night, for customers ordering through Kotipizza's own app.
Getting from a national rollout to something restaurants could trust
The first nationwide pilot, in 2019, priced delivery fees off demand across the whole country rather than what was actually happening at each restaurant. A quiet night in one city could get priced as if it were busy, because somewhere else in Finland, it was. Franchisees weren't happy with fees that didn't match what they were seeing on the ground.
Priceff and Kotipizza rebuilt the model around local, restaurant-level demand instead. A smaller second pilot tested the fix and came back "considerably more successful," clearing the way for a full rollout across all 60 delivery restaurants in southern Finland.
"I believe strongly that two touch points will be the winning formula in the future: the experience you get, first, on the mobile app, and, second, when your doorbell is ringing and the pizza gets handed to you," says Tommi Tervanen, Kotipizza's chairman.
Results on both sides of the order
Across the southern Finland rollout, Kotipizza saw units delivered grow 21% and delivery sales grow 20%, with delivery times dropping and availability improving during the peak hours that used to get overwhelmed. Customers order more on quiet nights because the fee drops to meet them, and restaurants capture more revenue when demand is genuinely high, instead of leaving it on a flat fee that was never built to flex either way.
Framed the right way, a moving fee doesn't feel like a penalty. It feels like a reason to time your order well, the same instinct customers already have with airline and hotel prices.
What this means for food delivery operators
A fixed delivery fee is a single number trying to do the job of pricing every hour of the week at once. Kotipizza's results show what happens when that number is allowed to move with real order volume instead: quiet periods get busier, peak periods get more profitable, and menu prices never have to be touched to get there. Kotipizza is now applying the same demand-based approach to menu pricing itself, extending the model beyond delivery fees.
