How to Save Money on Pizza Delivery: 11 Tactics

There is a lot of advice about saving money on takeaway pizza and most of it is worth nothing. Telling someone to look for coupons is not advice; it is a description of wanting to spend less. What follows is the list we actually use, in the order of how much money each one saves on a typical order.

For context: across our sample of stores, a family delivery order of two large pizzas, a side and a drink comes to somewhere between thirty-four and fifty-two dollars depending entirely on how it is put together. That eighteen-dollar spread is the whole subject of this article. Nothing here involves eating less pizza.

1. Switch to carryout, when it is genuinely practical

This is the largest single saving available and it is not close. Collecting your own order removes the delivery fee, removes the tip, and — this is the part people miss — usually unlocks a separate, cheaper price on the pizza itself. Chains run flat-rate carryout offers that simply do not exist in delivery mode.

Add those three together on a single large pizza and you are frequently looking at eight to twelve dollars, which is most of the price of the pizza. The caveat is real, though: if collecting means a twenty-minute drive each way, you have spent forty minutes and a gallon of petrol to save nine dollars. Carryout wins when the store is close.

2. Price your basket both ways before you check out

Chains run two parallel pricing systems: menu prices, and deal prices. They are not the same items at different discounts — they are separate structures, and which one wins depends on what you are ordering.

A percentage-off code applied to menu prices beats a flat bundle when your order is large. A flat bundle beats a percentage when your order is small and includes cheap items. The only way to know is to build the basket twice, which takes ninety seconds and regularly finds four or five dollars.

3. Order the most expensive thing inside a flat-price deal

If an offer says any large pizza at a fixed price, that fixed price buys you a plain cheese pizza or a fully loaded meat pizza equally. One of those is a much better use of the money.

This sounds obvious written down. In practice, people default to ordering what they normally order and then apply whatever deal fits, rather than choosing the item that extracts the most from the deal. Reverse the order of those decisions.

4. Take the drinks off the order

Soft drinks from a pizza store cost roughly twice supermarket price. A two-litre bottle and a couple of individual drinks on a family order is five or six dollars of pure convenience charge, and it is the least painful thing on the list to remove because you are not giving up any food.

The exception is a bundle that includes the drink at no extra cost. Where that exists, take it.

5. Count your toppings before you check out

Build-your-own pizzas start cheap and get expensive fast, because each topping carries a charge that scales with pizza size. Somewhere around the third or fourth topping on a large, a specialty pizza with five toppings becomes cheaper than your custom one with four.

Almost nobody checks this at the point of ordering. It is worth thirty seconds of comparison every time.

6. Use the free modifications

Light sauce, extra sauce, light cheese, well-done bake, square cut instead of wedge cut — all free at most stores, all of which change the pizza. Extra cheese and extra meat are the paid ones. Knowing which is which means you can customise substantially without touching the price.

7. Sign in before you order, every time

Loyalty points do not attach to guest checkouts, and most schemes will not add them retrospectively. Every guest order is a small amount of free pizza thrown away.

Worth knowing: at most chains, carryout orders earn points at the same rate as delivery. People assume they do not and lose points on exactly the orders they should be placing.

8. Order early rather than at peak

This does not change the price directly, but it changes what you get for it. Placing an order at 6:30pm on a Friday puts you into the deepest part of the queue at every store in the country. The same order at 5:15pm arrives faster and in better condition, and you have paid the same money for a materially better product.

9. Scale up rather than adding items

Going from a medium to a large costs a few dollars and adds around sixty percent more pizza. Adding a second medium costs the full price of a second pizza. When feeding more people, the first move is always to increase size, not quantity.

10. Stop paying for wings as a main course

Wings are the worst food-per-dollar item on a pizza menu because a large share of the weight is bone. As a side for a table, fine. As the thing that feeds a person, a second pizza costs less and feeds more.

11. Tip on the driver, not on the total

This one is not about spending less — it is about spending it in the right place. The delivery fee is a store charge and, at most chains, does not reach the driver. Cutting the tip because a fee was already applied is a misunderstanding that costs the person who drove to your house.

If your budget is tight, cut the drinks and the extra cheese. Do not cut the tip.

Putting it together

The tactics stack. On the family order we priced at the top of this article, using carryout where practical, dropping the drinks, choosing the deal structure that suits the basket and putting the heaviest pizza into the flat-rate slot takes a fifty-dollar order to the mid-thirties without removing a single slice of pizza from the table.

None of it requires waiting for a special promotion or hunting for a code. It requires ordering deliberately rather than by habit, which is the only pizza-saving advice we would stand behind.