Hacker News Reader

Comment by peteretep | Hacker News Reader

I've spent many thousands of dollars on app-delivered food over the last few years (Foodpanda, Uber Eats, Grab Food, Lineman, and Deliveroo). I use the apps because:

- GPS tracking of the driver, and helpful notifications

- Discovery of new restaurants

- Detailed menu (and occasionally useful suggestions of menu items)

- I don't have to create a new account or fuck around with giving some restaurant my credit card

- I don't have to speak to a human

I'm hungry right now. I can pick up my phone, and in 30s, without needing to do anything other than click on the food I want to eat, in 25m I will have a human with food at my building's lobby.

View on HN

That last bit only applies in dense downtowns. In the Bay Area, if I'm hungry right now and that happens to be roughly dinner time, I'm waiting 50-70 minutes for a food delivery.

My guess is that your app of choice can show you estimated delivery times for different restaurants based on distance and avg preparation, adding yet another reason for using

Yes. I'm just saying that the majority of restaurants in the greater bay area will have lengthy delivery times during weekday dinner hours... the exception being if you order from a place physically close to your delivery point.

> - I don't have to create a new account or fuck around with giving some restaurant my credit card

In case you need to in the future, i'd recommend privacy.com for merchant-locked cards.

How has your experience been with privacy.com?

Usually gets your Uber account terminated or not able to sign up in the first place with a prepaid.

Hopefully not a problem with small businesses?

It does become a problem depending on their POS vendor deciding to flag prepaids, I've seen several dislike this because of the ability to modify transactions afterward / tip or something of the sort, for the restaurant industry.

Mine has been excellent apart from the daily limit and merchants that don't accept their cards like cloud providers. Takes a bit of regular activity before support will raise the limit but the fact that Privacy.com cards show up as prepaid (try it out with the Stripe api, for example) is a show stopper for some narrow use cases - which overlap almost perfectly with spammers so who can blame the merchants.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com