Veteran-owned. Jacksonville-based. Fixed rate per verified delivery. No auction, no Middleman Tax.
Jacksonville restaurants market data
Customer acquisition cost
WordStream: Google Ads benchmarks by industry (Restaurants & Food)Cost per lead (FL)
WordStream: Google Ads benchmarks by industry (Restaurants & Food)Highest service-call window
National Restaurant Association: research and industry statisticsThe product
WilDi Maps is not a single flat-rate product. You pick the tier that matches how local you need to be. All three are GPS-verified per claim, with no auction, no exchange rake, no Middleman Tax.
1-mile road strip
Premium
Hyper-local, just-in-time
Claim a one-mile stretch. When a driver enters the strip, they get a just-in-time message, perfect for emergency services, on-route specials, and anything where being right there now beats brand awareness later.
Best for
1-square-mile area
Premium
Hyper-local, area-based
Claim a one-square-mile block, not tied to a single road. Catches the residential cluster, retail district, or industrial park where your work actually lives. Same just-in-time delivery as tunnels; different geometry.
Best for
City-wide rotation
From $0.25
per claim, tier-based
City-wide brand presence on rotation. Highest reach for the budget; best when familiarity beats precision. Per-delivery rate drops by tier (Enterprise: $0.25 / Pro: $0.32 / Local: $0.40 / Starter: $0.50). See /pricing for the live rate card.
Best for
What the driver gets when an ad is claimed
If the driver wants to act on the ad, the app navigates them straight to the advertiser's location.
Click-through to any URL: ordering page, brand site, blog post, lead form.
Open a specific page inside the WilDi app: promo details, daily specials, claim instructions.
See the full pricing breakdown on the pricing page.
The honest channel breakdown, not vendor pitches. Numbers below are public benchmarks, sourced inline. Each channel has a job; the question is which one delivers the homeowner with a failing system at a price that lets you stay profitable.
| Channel | Cost range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Google Search Ads (restaurant keywords) | ~$1.95 average CPC; ~$35 per lead | One of the cheaper CPC verticals, but intent is leaky: most 'restaurants near me' searches resolve inside Google Maps without a paid click, and a 'lead' is a menu view, not a booked table. WordStream: Google Ads benchmarks by industry |
| Delivery apps (DoorDash, Uber Eats) | 15-30% commission per delivery order | DoorDash's published partnership plans take 15% (Basic), 25% (Plus), or 30% (Premier) of every delivery order, before payment processing. On a $40 ticket that is $6-$12 per order, every order, forever. The app also owns the customer relationship. DoorDash: Marketplace partnership plans |
| Yelp Ads (restaurant category) | Budget-based CPC; typically several dollars per click in dining | Pay-per-click against diners already comparing you to the restaurant next door in the same interface. Strong for capture, weak for demand creation. iCatch Group: How much do Yelp ads cost |
| Direct mail / EDDM menus and postcards | $0.40-$0.60 all-in per piece (USPS EDDM postage from ~$0.24 plus print) | Still works for grand openings and family-dense ZIPs like Mandarin and Nocatee. One-shot exposure: the piece lands once, usually mid-day, far from the dinner decision. USPS: Every Door Direct Mail pricing |
| WilDi Maps: Cost Per Verified Delivery (CPVD) | From $0.25 (background, tier-based); tunnels and zones priced for hyper-local | GPS-verified delivery to a real phone while they're driving through your chosen Jacksonville corridor or neighborhood, timed to when they are physically near your door. Recommended for restaurants: a tunnel on the drive-home corridor past your block, plus background rotation for city-wide recall. No auction, no per-order commission, no Middleman Tax. WilDi Maps pricing |
The pricing model
Cost Per Verified Delivery (CPVD) is a pricing model where you pay a tier-based rate (from $0.25) each time your message is delivered to a real phone moving through a real street segment you own. The delivery is GPS-verified: the device was physically present in the corridor at the time of delivery. Not an impression, not a click, not a "potential reach": a delivery to a known location at a known time.
CPVD replaces auction-based CPM (cost per thousand impressions) and CPC (cost per click), the pricing models that hide 30-50% of an HVAC budget in the Middleman Tax. No exchanges, no demand-side platforms, no supply-side platforms, no resellers. One fixed rate, one verified delivery, one operator on the other end.
Read the full breakdown of where every dollar of an ad budget actually goes: What is the Middleman Tax?
Also known as ad platform fees. What is the Middleman Tax?
Same budget. Follow where the dollars actually go. Pick your vertical for a personalized waste estimate, or leave it on Average for the industry-wide baseline.
That's $30,000 per year. Here's where every dollar ends up:
What you put in
29% taken by SSPs and DSPs before an ad runs
35% on made-for-advertising sites, unmeasurable and non-viewable placements, and bots
36% of what you put in
Same budget, same ambition
Fixed verified human delivery · no auction
100% of your budget, a known quantity
$19,200 stops flowing to middlemen. 93,744 WilDi verified deliveries instead.
Priority Access to Jacksonville pilot zone and tunnel coverage. Background brands can use the Phase 1 Jacksonville rollout now as we start expanding.
Baseline Middleman Tax is anchored to the ANA Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study: Complete Report (Association of National Advertisers, December 5, 2023), which found that transaction costs, primarily DSP and SSP fees, account for 29 percent of the ad dollar, and that only 36 cents of every dollar entering a DSP effectively reaches the consumer once invalid traffic, non-viewable impressions and made-for-advertising sites are counted. Per-vertical estimates are not pure fee figures: they blend that fee skim with WordStream cost-per-click benchmarks and DoubleVerify invalid-traffic rates. Full methodology and sources →
Jacksonville's median home year built is 1986 , meaning a typical home is now 40 years old, well past original-system replacement age. The neighborhoods below combine housing-stock age, AC-strain factors, and replacement-driven demand.
Established dining district on the Hendricks Avenue corridor. Dense evening commute traffic passes independent restaurants on the drive home, the exact decision window for 'where are we eating tonight'.
The King Street and Park Street dining strips draw young professionals with high dine-out frequency and strong social-referral behavior.
Beach dining corridor with heavy weekend traffic on 3rd Street (A1A). Locals and day-trippers both pass through one predictable strip.
St. Johns Town Center retail gravity puts thousands of drivers per day next to the densest cluster of sit-down restaurants in the metro. Standing out here is a visibility problem, not a quality problem.
Family-suburb stock with reliable weeknight takeout and family-dinner demand; the household-of-four repeat customer that carries a neighborhood restaurant.
Fast-growing young families with new-household dining habits still forming. The first restaurants a new resident tries become the defaults.
For operators on shared-lead platforms
Delivery-app commissions are the restaurant version of the Middleman Tax: a percentage of every order, forever, for demand that mostly came from your own reputation, and the platform keeps the customer relationship. CPVD is a different model entirely: a fixed price per GPS-verified delivery to a nearby phone while they're driving, no commission on the ticket, and the walk-in it produces is your customer, not the app's. See how the math compares against auction and marketplace channels.
See the lead-marketplace comparisonHonest take
WilDi isn't the right answer for every restaurant ad budget. A few honest cases where other channels still pencil out:
If the entire business lives inside the delivery apps and there is no door for a customer to walk through, app-native placement and app search ads are the demand channel that matches the fulfillment model. CPVD produces walk-ins; a ghost kitchen cannot take one.
A restaurant whose covers are mostly visitors booking from hotels converts better through TripAdvisor, OTA placement, and hotel-concierge relationships than through repeated exposure to local commuters. Locals are WilDi's strength; a one-visit tourist audience is not.
When the franchisor mandates that ad dollars flow through a national co-op buy, the local operator often is not free to redirect budget. CPVD only helps the operator who controls their own marketing spend.
Dinner is decided in the car. The 5-7 pm drive home is the single densest 'where are we eating' decision window of the day, and it happens on a handful of predictable corridors: Hendricks Avenue through San Marco, Beach Boulevard, 3rd Street at the beaches, San Jose through Mandarin. A tunnel is a one-mile stretch of road you own on WilDi. Every verified person driving through it gets your offer on their phone while they are minutes from your door. That is demand capture at the moment of decision, not an impression served to a bot at 2 am.
Cost Per Verified Delivery is WilDi Maps' pricing model. You pay a fixed rate, starting from $0.25 on background rotation (tier-based), each time your message is delivered to a real phone that GPS confirms is physically in the area you chose. Tunnels (1-mile road strips) and zones (neighborhood-sized areas) are priced higher for hyper-local precision. The person taps to acknowledge the message, so a delivery is never an invisible impression. No auction, no bots, and unlike a delivery app, no percentage of the ticket.
They are different units, and the difference compounds. DoorDash's published plans take 15-30% of every delivery order: on a $40 family ticket that is $6-$12, charged again on every reorder, and the app keeps the customer data. A WilDi verified delivery costs a fixed published rate once, from $0.25 on background, puts your name on a nearby phone while they're driving, and the walk-in customer it produces is yours: full-margin ticket, your loyalty program, your repeat business. Delivery apps rent you demand; a corridor you own builds it.
They are cheap but leaky. Restaurant CPCs run around $2, among the lowest of any local vertical, because most dining intent resolves inside Google Maps without a paid click. A paid 'lead' is usually a menu view or a direction request, not a booked table, and the searcher is comparison-shopping every restaurant in the map pack at once. Google is worth keeping for brand-name searches. The gap it cannot fill is reaching the person two blocks away at 5:45 pm who is already driving and has not searched anything yet. That is the delivery WilDi verifies.
Background ads reach every active person on the WilDi network, nationwide by default, and for most restaurants you should use the optional area limit: pick one area (your city, or your side of town) and delivery stops the moment they leave it. A neighborhood restaurant in San Marco gains nothing from a delivery to someone vacationing out of state, and the area limit keeps every dollar of budget on people who can actually walk through the door this week. Pair the limited background with a tunnel on your dinner-commute corridor.
Yes. In the April 2026 Players Locker Room pilot on Hendricks Avenue in San Marco, people received the WilDi ping while driving, drove to a restaurant they had never been to, and posted about the visit on their own social channels, unprompted. The photos on our homepage are theirs, unedited. That is the proof model we care about: not impression counts, but a real person who got the message in the car and walked through the door.
One verified delivery of your offer to the phone of one real person who was physically inside your chosen geography at that moment, confirmed by GPS on the device itself. That person also taps to acknowledge the offer, so a delivery is never an invisible impression. Bots, background tabs, and off-screen impressions cannot generate one. You are billed only when a verified delivery happens.
Background reaches everyone active in the WilDi app: nationwide by default, or limited to one area you choose (your city, your side of town) so budget is never spent outside it. A zone is a neighborhood-sized area you hold exclusively: while it is yours, no competitor can run there. A tunnel is a one-mile stretch of road you can place anywhere, and it follows the road's contours, ideal for the approach to your shop or a route your customers already drive.
The Starter tier opens with a $50 deposit, and that deposit becomes your ad budget. Background deliveries on Starter run $0.50 per verified delivery, so the first deposit buys 100 GPS-verified deliveries to the phones of real local people out on the road. There is no auction and no platform fee stacked on top.
Four public tiers: Starter ($50 minimum deposit, background only), Local ($250, up to 2 tunnels and 1 zone), Pro ($1,000, up to 8 tunnels and 5 zones), and Enterprise ($3,000, up to 25 tunnels and 15 zones). Per-delivery background rates step down by tier, from $0.50 on Starter to $0.25 on Enterprise. An Agency tier is available through sales.
About this analysis
Written by Timm Ross, founder of WilDi Maps · Jacksonville-based · Veteran-owned. We run our own delivery mesh in this market and hold ourselves to the same numbers we publish.
More about WilDi MapsPriority Access is open to the Jacksonville pilot cohort. Fixed rate. No auction. No bidding. No Middleman Tax.
