How Much Is Enough, Chowdeck?

A paying customer's rant. Not a journalist's column.

Let me be upfront about something before we go any further: this is not a think-piece from someone who ordered jollof rice once, got the wrong change, and decided to become a food-tech critic. This is a rant. A proper, considered, thoroughly earned rant from someone who has spent enough money on this app to furnish a decent living room and still not feel guilty about it.

I use Chowdeck every single day. Not occasionally. Not when I’m feeling lazy. Every. Single. Day. My minimum monthly spend on the app is ₦200,000. Run that math: ₦2.4 million a year. Per annum. On a food delivery app. I have achieved Prime Minister status, the highest customer tier on the platform. My Twitter mutuals have taken to calling me ChowdeckMan, which is either a compliment or an intervention I’ve been too hungry to attend.

So when I say Chowdeck has lost the plot, I am not speaking from ignorance. I am speaking from a very receipted, very documented place of deep, personal disappointment.

In the beginning, it made sense

There was a moment — and if you were in Lagos around that time, you remember it — when Chowdeck felt like a genuine answer to a real problem. Getting food delivered in this city is not a simple thing. The traffic alone should qualify as a pre-existing condition. The infrastructure is inconsistent, the logistics brutal, and most delivery options before them were either overpriced, unreliable, or both.

Chowdeck came in feeling different. Faster. More intentional. The kind of startup that understood the brief. They weren’t just moving food; they were solving something genuinely messy in one of the most complex urban environments on the planet. Running a delivery business in Nigeria means negotiating bad roads, rider safety, unpredictable weather, restaurants that open when they feel like it, and customers who will leave a one-star review because their pepper soup arrived at forty-seven degrees instead of fifty. It is not for the faint-hearted.

And for a while, they nailed it. The UI was clean, the delivery windows were reasonable, and it genuinely felt like someone behind the product cared about the experience on both ends. That care, that early, unmistakable sense of a company that gave a damn about its users, is what made Chowdeck worth talking about.

It is also exactly what they have since set on fire.

When did the greed move in?

At some point — and I cannot tell you the precise moment, because like all rot, it happened gradually — Chowdeck stopped being a customer-first company and became a fee-stacking exercise with a nice logo.

It started with the restaurant prices. You would be on the app about to order your usual, and the price would be higher than what it cost at the physical restaurant. The restaurants, we are told, set their own prices on the platform. Fine. Technically true. But the cumulative effect for the customer is that every order already has a hidden markup before you’ve seen a naira of delivery or service fees.

Then the delivery fees crept up. Then they introduced a service fee. Then the service fee went up. Then there were surge charges. Then there were minimum order requirements for certain features. Layer after layer after layer, each one arriving quietly, without ceremony, without explanation. Just there one day. A new cost you didn’t consent to, dressed up as normal business.

And look, I understand that companies have to make money. I am not naïve. Running a logistics operation in Lagos costs real money, and margins in this industry are not glamorous. I am not asking Chowdeck to deliver food for the love of God and country. I am asking them to be honest about what they are doing and to treat the people funding their operation with basic respect.

That is where they have failed. Spectacularly. Repeatedly. And with what can only be described as remarkable consistency.

The silence is the actual problem

Here is what separates a company that is growing through necessary pricing adjustments from one that is simply extracting: transparency.

Chowdeck introduces features, changes terms, and adds costs with the communication strategy of someone leaving a relationship. No announcement. No explanation. No courtesy message to the people who have been sustaining your business. You just open the app one day and something has changed. You find out at checkout. Or you find out when you try to use a feature and realise it no longer works the way it was sold to you.

Terms and conditions are not novel. Every business has them. But there is a reasonable expectation that a consumer-facing product — one that processes real money from real people on a daily basis — will make an effort to keep those consumers informed when material things change. Chowdeck’s approach is to bury the details, let customers discover the restrictions at the worst possible moment, and rely on their customer care team to deliver the bad news retroactively.

That is not a communication failure. That is a design choice.

Let me give you the evidence

Exhibit A: The Prime Minister’s Locked Benefits

As a Prime Minister customer, I receive four free deliveries and two ₦2,000 discounts per month. Sounds generous. Here is what they don’t tell you, not upfront, not clearly, not anywhere visible unless you go looking with intent: to use the ₦2,000 discount, you must spend a minimum of ₦6,000 on that order. To use the free delivery, your order must be at least ₦3,000.

I found out both of these things not because Chowdeck told me. I found out because I tried to use them and was blocked. The feature text sells you the benefit without the asterisk. The app does not display these thresholds clearly. The customer care team, bless them, gave me an explanation so thin I had to read it three times to confirm it contained actual information.

This is not a footnote issue. These are conditions that determine whether your benefits are functional. Not displaying them prominently is not an oversight — it is the outcome someone chose.

Exhibit B: The Wheel of False Hope

Chowdeck introduced a spin-to-win feature called the Wheel of Love. Twelve segments. Ten of them contain prizes — free deliveries, percentage discounts, that sort of thing. Two segments read “Nothing” and “Spin Again.” On the surface, those odds look rather lovely.

In practice, you could spin that wheel two hundred times and land on a prize twice. The wheel is weighted. Heavily. Internally, it has been programmed to limit wins as aggressively as possible while maintaining the visual suggestion of abundance.

I want to be clear: I do not think Chowdeck should give away the shop. Promotional features have to be financially sustainable. But if you want to run a tight giveaway, design a tight wheel. Make the prizes feel genuinely earned. What they have instead is a twelve-segment wheel that performs generosity while delivering almost nothing. It is the food-tech equivalent of a magic trick where you already know where the card is.

Exhibit C: The ChowScore Bait

In a move that was genuinely exciting on paper, Chowdeck announced that you could use your ChowScore — points accumulated through spending and giving reviews — to pay for airtime, data, and even fund betting accounts. Practical, clever, well-conceived.

I had a solid ChowScore balance. I used it. Converted 750 points into ₦7,500 worth of value. Wonderful. Came back to use it again weeks later. Was told my limit was now 200 ChowScore (₦2,000) per transaction.

Had anyone told me this? You already know the answer.

No email. No in-app notification. No update on the feature page. Just a limit that appeared at the moment of use, as though Chowdeck has timed these revelations for maximum dramatic effect. I’m starting to think they have a person whose job is to calculate the precise worst moment to let customers find out things.

Exhibit D: Chowpass, or ‘Zero Delivery Fee’ as a Figure of Speech

This is the one that broke me.

Chowpass is a subscription feature. You pay — monthly, quarterly, or biannually — for access to a zero delivery fee arrangement across a range of listed restaurants. That is the product. That is what it says on the label. Zero. Delivery. Fee.

I subscribed. I used it. It worked. Until, one day, it didn’t. I opened the app to order from a restaurant clearly listed under Chowpass, saw the “0 delivery fee” badge — the indicator that tells you the feature applies — proceeded to checkout, and found a delivery fee waiting for me there. Between ₦100 and ₦300, depending on the order.

I contacted customer care. I was told to go ahead and order and I would be refunded. I had been burned enough times by Chowdeck to know better. I did not order.

Seventy-two hours later, same restaurant, same story. I contacted customer care again. This time, the answer was more creative: the restaurant is within Chowpass coverage, but it is “out of range,” and because of something involving tiers, a subsidised delivery fee applies.

I need you to sit with that sentence.

A restaurant is in Chowpass. The zero delivery fee badge shows. But a delivery fee applies because the restaurant is out of range. In a zone where the restaurant, by Chowdeck’s own system, qualifies for Chowpass. I was in Adeniyi Jones trying to order from Allen Avenue. Anyone who knows Lagos knows those are not different planets.

But it gets more layered. Even before this spatial mystery came into play, Chowpass already has a minimum spend requirement to activate the free delivery — ₦3,000 for restaurants, ₦5,000 for supermarkets. The latter, by the way, was changed without notice. So the deal is: subscribe to a zero delivery fee product, meet the minimum spend threshold, confirm the restaurant is Chowpass-eligible, and still pay a delivery fee because of some internal geography that exists nowhere in the product marketing.

I cannot emphasise this enough: I do not care if the delivery fee is ₦10. That is not the point. The point is that I paid for zero delivery. Zero. Not subsidised. Not reduced. Zero. And I am being charged. That is not a pricing adjustment. That is a breach of what was sold to me.

Some unsolicited advice

If Chowpass as currently constructed cannot deliver on its premise, there are honest paths forward.

Raise the subscription price to cover the actual cost of what was promised. Rebrand the feature as a subsidised delivery product and price it accordingly. Or remove it and return to standard delivery fees across the board. Any of these options would be defensible. Any of them would be honest.

What is not defensible is selling “zero delivery fee” and delivering a delivery fee. What is not honest is discovering that a feature you are actively paying for does not work as described, at the moment you are trying to use it, with no prior communication that anything had changed.

So when does it end?

I opened this piece by telling you I am not a casual user. I wanted to make that clear so that what I’m about to say lands properly: I am actively looking for an alternative.

Not because of the cost. I have spent ₦2.4 million on this app in a single year and not lost sleep over it. The money is not what is pushing me away.

It is the greed. It is the quiet, relentless, carefully curated greed that has replaced whatever customer-first instinct once drove this company. The inflated pricing. The layered fees. The misleading feature launches. The giveaways designed to feel generous while delivering almost nothing. The features that arrive like gifts and reveal themselves, at the point of use, to be loaded with conditions nobody told you about.

The company I really liked — the one that made me ChowdeckMan, that had my mutuals watching me spend money on food with the kind of loyalty usually reserved for cult members — that company is genuinely unrecognisable in what Chowdeck has become.

There is a version of scaling a consumer product that keeps the customer at the centre even as the business matures. It requires discipline and a degree of commercial restraint. It requires treating transparency not as a legal obligation but as a relationship commitment. Chowdeck, at some point, decided that was too much effort.

And so here we are. A Prime Minister customer, writing a long rant on the internet because I cannot get a zero delivery fee on a subscription I pay for, from a restaurant that qualifies for it, and nobody thought to tell me that the rules had changed.

I am not angry because I cannot afford it. I am angry because I trusted them, and they used that trust as a production line for more quiet extractions.

How much is enough, Chowdeck?

Because from where I am sitting, you have not yet found the answer.

This article was written in one sitting, fuelled by frustration and a delivery fee I did not agree to. The author is not a journalist. He is just a man who really liked an app and is grieving what it used to be.