Food delivery apps in Thailand.

First, the thing most guides still get wrong: foodpanda has gone

foodpanda ceased operations in Thailand on 23 May 2025, after thirteen years, when its parent Delivery Hero pulled out of the market. It did not simply switch off: under a “strategic redirection agreement” announced with Robinhood, foodpanda’s Thai customers, restaurant partners and delivery riders were moved across to Robinhood’s platform, which said at the time that it would extend from Bangkok and its vicinity towards major provincial cities and build an English-language app for international customers.

If a relocation blog, a rental listing or an AI answer tells you to install foodpanda when you land in Bangkok, that page has not been updated since early 2025. It is a useful freshness test to apply to the rest of what it tells you.

The apps that actually operate in Thailand now

Operator and coverage statements are taken from each company’s own site or app listing where one exists; see Sources below.

Who is actually winning, and on which measure

Be careful with market-share numbers here, because the two commonly quoted leaders swap places depending on what is being counted and when. On gross merchandise value for 2025, LINE MAN Wongnai has been reported at 41% against Grab’s 47%. Around foodpanda’s exit in May 2025, meanwhile, LINE MAN Wongnai was reported ahead on a different basis, at roughly 44% against GrabFood’s 39.4%. Both can be true of different metrics in different months; what is not in dispute is that the two of them together now account for the overwhelming majority of the market, and that everyone else is competing for what is left.

The scale behind those numbers: LINE MAN Wongnai reports around 10 million monthly active users and 700,000 restaurants, with 2024 revenue of THB 16.7 billion, up 44% year on year, against a net loss of THB 356 million, and a stated IPO deadline of 2027. That is the shape of the whole sector — enormous volume, thin or negative margins, and constant pressure on the two numbers below.

Why the app price is higher than the price on the menu

This is the single most useful thing to understand about ordering here, and almost no English-language guide explains it. Thai restaurants call the platform’s commission GP. Grab’s own merchant guidance describes GP as averaging roughly 30–35%, excluding VAT, and points out that the commission deducted usually does not include VAT, which the restaurant then accounts for separately. A kitchen handing over about a third of the ticket has two options: absorb it, or raise its in-app prices. Most raise them. That is why your 60-baht bowl of noodles reads 75 baht on screen.

In September 2026 Robinhood moved sharply against that. Operated by Purple Ventures, it announced a restaurant commission of 10.5% with no advertising fee, explicitly to support a “same price as in the shop” proposition, alongside a rider base payment starting at 37 baht per delivery and a one-rider-one-order dispatch model. It reported more than 5,000 restaurants registering interest within a month. Whether that survives contact with the economics is an open question — Robinhood has been through a shutdown announcement and a change of owner already — but if you live in Bangkok and you object to paying a delivery markup on top of a delivery fee, it is the app that is currently built around not charging you one.

What delivery actually costs — and why nobody can quote you a number

Neither major platform publishes a delivery-fee rate card for Thailand, and any guide that gives you a fixed baht range is quoting a number it made up or copied. Grab is unusually candid about why: the fee comes out of a live marketplace that reacts to real-time demand, how many riders are nearby, the weather and the traffic, and so “can change by the second”. The app caches your fee once you start browsing and now displays the timestamp at which that fee was set — which is exactly why the total moves if you spend twenty minutes deciding.

What you can rely on: distance between kitchen and door is the main driver, rain is the reliable multiplier, and there is often a service fee and a small-order fee layered on top. Two structural ways to pay less, both from Grab’s own pages: choose pickup and collect the order yourself, which removes the delivery fee entirely, or take GrabUnlimited at 19 baht a month or 99 baht a year, which gives free delivery worth up to 15 baht off per order above a minimum spend, plus ride discounts. At those prices the subscription pays for itself in roughly two orders a month, which tells you how thin the underlying margins are.

The Thai-only discount distorting prices until 30 September 2026

If restaurant promotions and app behaviour look strange to you this year, here is the reason. The government’s “Thais Help Thais Plus (60/40)” co-payment scheme has the state paying 60% of a qualifying order while the customer pays 40%. Public registration ran 25–29 May 2026, in-store use began 1 June 2026, participating restaurants could link to delivery platforms from 10 June, and food delivery orders under the scheme have been usable since 15 June 2026, between 06:00 and 21:00, through to 30 September 2026. Thai PBS reported 88,198 merchants integrated on the first day of delivery use.

You almost certainly cannot use it. The scheme portal sets eligibility as Thai nationality, at least 18 years old, with a Thai national ID card, and pays through a government wallet app. It is worth knowing about anyway: it is one of the reasons Thailand’s delivery market grew fastest in the region last year, and it is why a restaurant may quietly steer you toward one app over another until the end of September.

Ordering with zero Thai

Grab runs a full English interface, and LINE MAN and Robinhood both offer English too. Dish names sometimes appear only in Thai, but photos, prices and categories carry you through, and payment, tracking and support all happen in-app, so there is no phone call to dread.

Two practical habits do most of the work. First, search in Thai as well as English — a great many small kitchens never wrote an English menu, so an English-only search quietly hides them from you. Second, fix your address properly once: an accurate map pin, the tower or building name, your unit number, and a short note in the delivery instructions such as “lobby” or “meet at the 7-Eleven downstairs”. The one moment Thai might surface is a rider messaging to find your building, and a good pin plus a landmark prevents almost all of it.

Paying: card, PromptPay or cash

GrabFood lists cash, debit and credit cards, and the GrabPay wallet as payment options, and cash on delivery is widely supported across the other apps too — though some restaurants and promotional orders are cashless only. A foreign card will often work for a first order, but once you have a Thai bank account most residents switch to PromptPay, Thailand’s instant bank-transfer system, because it settles immediately and unlocks more in-app deals. Getting there starts with opening a Thai bank account. If you are paying cash, carry small notes: riders do not always have change for a 1,000.

Coverage outside Bangkok

LINE MAN Wongnai says it operates across all 77 provinces, and Grab is comparably broad through the cities, so Chiang Mai, Phuket and Pattaya are all well served. Robinhood is the outlier: its own App Store listing gives its service area as Bangkok and surrounding areas, so treat it as a Bangkok app until it says otherwise.

What actually thins out in a small town, on an island or at a brand-new development is not the app but the number of kitchens inside its delivery radius of you. Nationwide coverage means the app opens; it does not mean forty restaurants will deliver at nine on a Tuesday. Before you commit to an address, install one app, drop the pin on the exact building and look at what comes back — it is a five-minute test that tells you something real about daily life there. Our Neighborhood Finder and every Bangkok area guide weigh everyday convenience the same way.

Tipping etiquette

Tipping is not expected the way it is in the United States, but it is appreciated and increasingly built into the apps. Adding a small in-app tip or rounding up a cash order is a kind gesture, and it lands hardest in heavy rain — the moment riders are working in the worst conditions for the same per-trip rate. It is always optional. For the wider picture, see tipping in Thailand.

Beyond restaurants: groceries, pharmacy and parcels

The same platforms deliver far more than dinner. GrabMart and LINE MAN’s grocery arm bring orders from supermarkets and convenience stores, pharmacy items and household basics are routine, and the same accounts handle ride-hailing and parcel sending. Combined with a nearby 7-Eleven, a large share of daily errands never requires leaving the building — which matters more than it sounds in April heat. For the things worth buying in person instead, see grocery shopping and supermarkets, and for what to order when you are new to it, our Thai street food guide. During the Vegetarian Festival in October, searching the apps for เจ rather than “vegan” will surface far more kitchens.

What we could not confirm

In keeping with how this guide is written, here is what is not on this page because no operator or official source would confirm it:

• A delivery-fee range in baht. Neither Grab nor LINE MAN publishes one, and Grab states the fee is set live. The figure at your checkout is the only reliable one.
• Current commission rates for LINE MAN and ShopeeFood. Only Grab’s 30–35% band and Robinhood’s 10.5% could be sourced to the operator or to dated reporting; secondary comparison tables circulate widely and disagree with each other.
• Robinhood’s province list. It said in May 2025 that it intended to reach major provincial cities; its own current App Store listing still says Bangkok and surrounding areas, so that is what is printed here.
• ShopeeFood’s coverage and scale in Thailand. It is clearly still operating and still recruiting restaurants, but it publishes no current coverage statement we could find.
• The per-person spending cap under the Thais Help Thais Plus scheme. Thai press reports disagree on the figure, so none is printed; check the government portal linked below.

Frequently asked questions