Build a Delivery App Like PedidosYa: White Label Multi-Language Solution

Key takeaways

• PedidosYa operates in 15 Latin American countries from one app, offered in Spanish and English. It is not in Brazil, Mexico or Colombia.
• Translation is the easy part of multi-language. Currency, local payment rails, per-city catalogues and country tax rules carry most of the cost.
• Subscriptions now drive about 40 percent of Delivery Hero's Americas gross merchandise value, so plan a membership product from the start.
• Cash on delivery and local wallets are not optional in Latin America. Card-only checkout loses a large share of orders.
• Ownership is changing: Uber agreed to acquire Delivery Hero in July 2026, with PedidosYa's markets splitting between Uber and SSW Partners.

What PedidosYa is, and why it is worth copying

PedidosYa was founded in 2009 in Montevideo, Uruguay by Ariel Burschtin, Álvaro García and Ruben Sosenke, who started it as university students with early grant funding. Delivery Hero acquired a controlling stake in 2014, and the company absorbed Glovo's Latin American operations in 2020, adding five markets. Today it operates in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay and Venezuela.

The scale is substantial. PedidosYa states more than 19 million users, over 156,000 partner merchants of which about 75 percent are small businesses, and more than 458,000 registered riders, though those are company-supplied figures that have appeared unchanged for several months. The auditable numbers come from Delivery Hero's Americas segment, which is effectively PedidosYa: it reported a record one million average daily orders in the fourth quarter of 2025, and gross merchandise value of about 1.35 billion euros in the second quarter of 2026, growing 29.1 percent year on year. Its Android app has more than 50 million downloads and a 4.6 rating from 2.24 million reviews.

By mobile app monthly active users, Sensor Tower put PedidosYa at 19 percent of the Latin American delivery market in 2024, behind iFood at 40 percent and ahead of Rappi at 17 percent. In Argentina it led with 61 percent.

One thing to know before you model this business: in July 2026 Uber agreed to acquire Delivery Hero in a deal valuing it at about $14.8 billion, and on the same day Delivery Hero agreed to sell several markets to SSW Partners. Under that arrangement 13 PedidosYa markets go to Uber and Chile and Ecuador go to SSW Partners, with completion expected in the second half of 2027. This is a change of ownership rather than a withdrawal from the region, but it tells you something useful: even at this scale, multi-country delivery is capital-hungry enough that consolidation keeps happening.

The four apps you actually have to build

Every delivery marketplace of this kind is four products sharing one backend. Costing a single "delivery app" is the most common planning mistake.

Behind them sits the part customers never see and the part that decides whether the business works: the dispatch engine. It predicts when food will be ready, picks a rider, batches compatible orders, and reassigns when someone goes offline. PedidosYa has described work with Arcos Dorados, the McDonald's franchisee for Latin America, specifically to improve preparation-time prediction so a rider is assigned at the right moment rather than left waiting. It has also described systems in Venezuela that automatically change a store's status when service is likely to degrade, for example during a rider shortage.

Core features, in build order

Multi-language and multi-country architecture

This is where a PedidosYa-style build genuinely differs from a single-city clone, and where the title promise of a multi-language solution needs unpacking. PedidosYa's own app store listing offers Spanish and English, not a dozen languages. Its 15 markets are predominantly Spanish-speaking, so the real complexity is not translation at all: it is that one app has to behave like a local product in 15 different countries.

Layer 1: language strings

Keep every user-facing string in locale files from the first commit, never hardcoded. Retrofitting internationalisation into a shipped app is one of the most expensive refactors in mobile development. Plan for plural rules, date and number formats, and layouts that survive text expanding by roughly a third when translated. If you may later serve Brazil, Portuguese is a separate locale rather than a dialect of Spanish, and if you may serve the Middle East, build right-to-left support in early rather than bolting it on.

Layer 2: currency and price formatting

Store money as integer minor units with an explicit currency code, never as a floating-point number. Each country needs its own currency, decimal separator and rounding rules. Several Latin American markets have experienced high inflation, so merchants need to update prices frequently and your system has to handle that without breaking historical order records or analytics.

Layer 3: payment rails

This is the layer that most often delays a launch. PedidosYa's app lists four payment categories: credit cards, debit cards, cash and digital wallets. The wallets differ by country: Yappy in Panama and Tigo Money in Paraguay are two documented integrations. Cash on delivery remains essential across much of the region and is enabled per merchant rather than globally, which means your rider app needs change handling, cash reconciliation and settlement, a whole workflow that card-only platforms never build.

Plan for one payment gateway per country rather than a single global processor, and design the payment layer behind an interface so adding a market does not mean touching checkout logic.

Layer 4: catalogue and pricing

Merchants, menus, promotions, delivery zones and service fees all vary by city, not just by country. Model country, city and zone as first-class entities from the start. PedidosYa runs its own dark-store grocery brand alongside third-party supermarket catalogues, which means the same app renders very different product types.

Layer 5: legal and tax

Each market brings invoicing requirements, VAT handling, courier classification rules and data residency expectations. Commission caps are a real risk: in Argentina, the province of Santa Fe agreed a cap of 25 percent plus VAT on commissions for merchants selling essential goods. If your margin model assumes a fixed commission everywhere, a single regulatory change can break it.

The dispatch engine, explained plainly

Dispatch is the single component that separates a working delivery business from an expensive app, and it is usually the piece founders have thought least about. Its job sounds simple: when an order arrives, pick a rider. In practice it has to answer several questions at once, and getting any of them wrong costs money on every single order.

• When should the rider arrive? Assign too early and the rider waits unpaid at the counter, which is the fastest way to lose couriers. Assign too late and the food sits going cold. This is why preparation-time prediction matters: PedidosYa has described work with the McDonald's franchisee for Latin America specifically to sharpen that timing.
• Which rider? Not simply the closest one. A good assignment weighs distance to the merchant, direction of travel, vehicle type, current load, acceptance history and how long the rider has been idle.
• Can orders be batched? Combining two deliveries going the same way is the main lever on delivery cost per order, but batch too aggressively and the second customer gets cold food and leaves.
• What happens when it goes wrong? Riders go offline, merchants reject orders, addresses turn out to be wrong. You need automatic reassignment and a clear path to a human.

Start with a simple rule-based assignment: nearest available rider within a zone, with a short acceptance window and automatic fallback to the next candidate. That is enough to run a few hundred orders a day. Add batching and predicted prep times only once you have real data, because both depend on patterns you cannot guess in advance. PedidosYa has also described automatically changing a store's status when service is likely to degrade, for example during a rider shortage, which is a good example of protecting the customer experience rather than accepting every order.

Recommended tech stack

For reference on how a similar platform is resourced, PedidosYa became Delivery Hero's global technology hub in September 2024, building from Buenos Aires, Mendoza and Montevideo for about 70 countries, with a reported technology investment of around $87 million in 2025. You are not competing with that on day one, which is exactly why scope discipline matters.

What it costs and how long it takes

These are our estimates for an experienced team, and scope and team location move them a lot. Two line items consistently get underestimated. Dispatch is a genuine engineering problem rather than a feature, usually 15 to 25 percent of the build. Each additional country costs real money even on a multi-country platform, typically $10,000 to $30,000 for payment integration, invoicing, legal review and launch operations. Our breakdown of what it costs to build a SaaS MVP covers how these budgets behave in practice.

Running costs matter too: maps and geocoding, payment processing per transaction, SMS and push notifications, and cloud infrastructure that has to absorb a lunchtime peak every single day.

White label or custom?

If your plan is a standard restaurant and grocery delivery marketplace in one or two markets, a white label platform is almost always the right first move. You get the four apps, dispatch and an admin panel configured in weeks rather than months, and you can prove demand before committing to a full build. Our DoorDash clone platform covers that route, and if groceries are your focus, our guide to building a grocery delivery app goes deeper on catalogue and stock handling.

Build custom when your mechanic is genuinely unusual: multi-country from day one, an unconventional courier model, deep integrations with local payment or point-of-sale systems, or a dispatch approach that is your actual competitive advantage. Before you commit, confirm in writing that you receive full source code ownership, that the platform supports multiple currencies and locales rather than just translated text, and that payment gateways are pluggable per country.

How the money actually works

The pattern worth copying is the shift away from commission alone. Commission on a single order rarely covers the cost of delivering it. Subscriptions produce predictable revenue and raise order frequency, advertising is high margin, and merchant lending both earns a return and makes partners harder to poach. Build the subscription early, since it changes customer behaviour more than any discount campaign.

Launching: the hard part is supply, not software

A delivery marketplace needs restaurants, riders and customers at the same time, in the same neighbourhood, or none of the three sees any value. The practical sequence that works is to pick one dense area rather than a whole city, sign enough merchants that the listing page looks worth browsing, pay riders guaranteed hourly rates before order volume justifies it, and only then spend on customer acquisition. PedidosYa itself started in a single city before expanding to 15 countries over 15 years. Our guide to the marketplace chicken-and-egg problem covers twelve tactics for solving this.

Checklist for launching in a new country

Once the platform exists, adding a market is an operations project more than an engineering one. This is the sequence that keeps timelines honest.

Notice that only one of those six steps is really engineering work. That ratio is why multi-country delivery platforms are harder to copy than their feature lists suggest, and why PedidosYa took roughly 15 years to reach 15 countries.

Mistakes that sink these projects

• Treating localisation as translation. Budget for currency, payments, tax and per-city catalogues, not just language files.
• Card-only checkout. Cash on delivery and local wallets are mainstream payment methods across Latin America, not edge cases.
• Launching across a whole city. Thin coverage means long delivery times and poor retention. Dominate one area first.
• Ignoring the merchant app. If restaurants find it painful, they stop accepting orders and your customer experience collapses.
• Underbuilding dispatch. Manual assignment works until it suddenly does not.
• Assuming a fixed commission everywhere. Regulators in several markets have moved to cap delivery commissions.

Conclusion

Building a delivery app like PedidosYa means building four applications and a dispatch engine, then making that platform behave like a local product in every market you enter. The lesson from PedidosYa's own 15 years is that geography is the moat and localisation is the work: one app, 15 countries, each with its own currency, payment habits and rules. Start with a white label platform in one dense area, get the merchant experience right, add a subscription early, and only expand to a second country once the first one is profitable.

Sources

• Company and market data: PedidosYa on Google Play for markets, features, payment categories and app ratings, checked October 2026, and Sensor Tower on Latin American delivery market share.
• Ownership change: Uber's announcement of the Delivery Hero acquisition, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in July 2026, which enumerates the market split.
• Financial performance: Delivery Hero H1 2026 results for Americas segment growth and subscription share.
• Operations and technology: PedidosYa as Delivery Hero global tech hub and company-stated regional figures, which is sponsored content.
• Commission and subscription pricing: iProfesional analysis of Argentine delivery commissions and PedidosYa Plus launch in Uruguay.