Food delivery in Bangkok: which app still exists, and when not to bother

Search for Bangkok delivery apps and you will be handed a list of five or six options, several of which stopped operating in Thailand years ago. It is an unusually bad topic for stale advice, because the failed platforms leave working-looking wreckage behind — apps that still update, websites that still show restaurant menus and order buttons. The market went through a hard consolidation between 2021 and 2025 and came out with four platforms standing. Here is which ones are real, which one to install if you do not read Thai, and the situations where the honest answer is to put your shoes on.

Who is actually still here

GrabFood is the market leader and the safe default. It is fully bilingual, it is the app you will already have if you use Grab for rides, and — usefully for a visitor without Thai banking — Grab states plainly on its own Thai site that GrabFood accepts cash, debit and credit cards, or the GrabPay wallet. Cash on delivery being officially supported matters more than it sounds; it is the difference between ordering dinner on your first night and not.

LINE MAN, run by LINE MAN Wongnai, is the close second and by some distance the most deliberate about foreign customers. In October 2024 it launched automatic English translation of restaurant menus along with automatically translated rider chat — you type English, the rider reads Thai — across a claimed 700,000-plus restaurants in all 77 provinces. It reported its foreign customer base growing roughly fourfold year on year in early 2025. Two clarifications worth having: despite the name, you do not need a LINE messenger account, because LINE MAN is a standalone app; and while it translates menus, the Wongnai reviews underneath — Thailand’s big restaurant review corpus, wired directly into ordering — remain in Thai.

ShopeeFood is a real but distant third, and the thing to know is structural: in Thailand it lives inside the main Shopee app rather than as a separate download, which is why people conclude it has closed. It has not. Robinhood is the one that deserves a correction rather than a description. Launched by SCB in 2020 on a zero-commission model, it announced its own shutdown in 2024 — and that headline is what most guides still repeat. What actually happened is that SCBX sold the operator, Purple Ventures, to a consortium led by the Yip In Tsoi Group in September 2024, and the service kept running. Its apps were still being updated in July 2026. When foodpanda closed in May 2025, Robinhood picked up a good deal of that displaced business, though not by acquisition — customer data could not simply transfer, so foodpanda merely pointed its users across. One caveat to set expectations: by Robinhood’s own current description it covers Bangkok and surrounding areas, not the whole country.

What it costs, and the number nobody can honestly give you

Grab states that its delivery fees are calculated on the distance between pick-up and drop-off, and offers three tiers — Saver, Standard and Priority — with your total being the menu price plus that fee. What it does not publish, in Thailand, is any baht figure, and neither does anyone else. We are not going to invent one: quoted fee tables circulating in blog posts trace back to 2020 or to sites that still list dead platforms, and fees move with distance, demand, weather and promotion. Check the number in the app before you confirm; it is shown to you before you pay, which is the only version that is ever current.

On the question everyone asks — are in-app menu prices higher than the restaurant’s own? — here is the honest position. Platforms charge restaurants a commission on each order; Grab publicly described that as roughly 15% to 30% of order value back in 2021. Merchants set their own in-app prices and nothing obliges them to match the walk-in price, so the incentive to price higher on the app plainly exists. But we could find no consumer-protection finding, official price comparison or investigative reporting that establishes a markup as fact or attaches a percentage to it, and we are not going to be the site that invents one. If the difference matters to you on a particular order, the reliable move is to look at the shop’s own menu.

The subscription passes are the one place the maths is genuinely clean. GrabUnlimited costs 19 baht a month or 99 baht a year, giving free delivery worth up to 15 baht per qualifying food or mart order above a minimum spend, plus ride discounts and points. LINE MAN VIP costs the same 19 baht a month or 99 a year, with a 15-baht delivery discount per order, food discounts up to 15%, and reductions on Mart, Ride and Messenger. At roughly 15 baht saved against 19 baht a month, a pass covers itself at about two orders a month — which makes it an easy yes for anyone here longer than a fortnight who orders at all, and irrelevant for a four-day trip.

When ordering in is the wrong call

The case for delivery in Bangkok is strong and mostly weather-shaped. When a downpour lands mid-afternoon and the footpath outside your building becomes unusable, ordering is not laziness but arithmetic — and the same is true in the burning-season weeks when the air is bad enough that a fifteen-minute round trip on foot is a genuine cost. Late at night, once the trains have stopped, delivery is often the only thing still moving toward you.

The case against is more specific than people expect, and it is not really about money. Distance-based pricing punishes the short order. When the stall is two hundred metres up your soi and the dish costs fifty baht, the delivery fee is a large fraction of the meal — you are paying a meaningful premium to avoid a four-minute walk, which is exactly the trip where walking wins outright. The second problem is physical: a great deal of Thai street food travels badly. Noodle soup arrives with the broth already absorbed into the noodles; som tam weeps in the box; anything that depends on the contrast between something crisp and something wet arrives having lost the argument. That is an editorial judgement rather than a sourced fact, but it is a consistent one, and it is why the food most worth ordering tends to be curries, rice dishes and grilled things — and the food least worth ordering is the food you came to Bangkok for.

Two practical frictions to plan around. If you are in a condo or hotel, riders generally will not reach your floor, so expect a lobby handoff and count the lift time as part of the wait — something to think about when you are choosing between a hot dish and one that survives ten minutes downstairs. And if you have arrived without a local number, sort your SIM or eSIM before you try to register: sign-up and delivery both run on phone verification and rider calls, and this is not the moment to discover a problem with either. We deliberately have not printed a claim about whether a foreign number works, because no official source states it clearly in either direction — and a wrong answer there strands you at the sign-up screen with dinner unordered.

Quick answers

Is foodpanda still here?

No — Thailand operations ended 23 May 2025, food and grocery together. The app persists for other countries.

Did Robinhood shut down?

No. It was sold in September 2024 instead, and still runs in Bangkok and surrounding areas.

Which app for English?

LINE MAN — auto-translated menus and rider chat since October 2024. Grab is the bilingual all-rounder.

Can I pay cash?

Grab states GrabFood accepts cash, cards or GrabPay. We couldn’t confirm cash on the others.

Is a subscription worth it?

At 19 baht a month for about 15 baht off each delivery, it pays back at roughly two orders a month.