TL;DR: Amazon just ended its restaurant delivery partnership with Grubhub and handed the whole thing to Uber Eats instead. Prime members in the US get food delivery through Amazon with no Uber account required and no delivery fee on orders over $25, and Amazon’s throwing in $20 off your first two orders to get people to actually notice the switch.
The announcement came Thursday, and it’s a bigger deal than the matter-of-fact press framing suggests. Amazon’s relationship with Grubhub wasn’t new or casual. It went back to 2022, when Amazon first struck a deal offering Prime members a free Grubhub+ subscription as a perk. That partnership deepened in 2024, when Amazon expanded the agreement and made the free Grubhub+ membership permanent for Prime subscribers rather than a limited promotion.
This was more than a delivery partnership
Amazon’s ties to Grubhub went well past a simple delivery arrangement. Around the same time it expanded the 2024 deal, Amazon also struck an agreement with Just Eat Takeaway, Grubhub’s then-owner, to increase its equity stake in the company to as much as 18%. That arrangement was performance-based, renewed annually, and included warrants for additional stake down the line. Amazon elected to cash out those exercisable warrants in December 2024, according to Just Eat Takeaway’s own annual report.
Not long after that, Just Eat Takeaway announced plans to sell Grubhub entirely to Wonder, the food delivery startup that’s reportedly exploring its own IPO right now. Amazon kept its commercial partnership running through all of that corporate shuffling, right up until this week’s announcement ended it.
That’s the part of this story that’s easy to miss if you just read the headline. This wasn’t Amazon casually swapping delivery vendors. It was Amazon unwinding years of financial entanglement with a company that changed ownership out from under the partnership, then deciding Uber was simply the better long-term bet once the dust settled.
Grubhub+ members aren’t left stranded immediately
If you’re a Prime member who had already activated Grubhub+ through the Amazon benefit, you’re not cut off right away. Amazon says those members can keep using their Grubhub+ membership through December 31, 2027. But new activations through Amazon.com or the Shopping app are done as of Thursday. The pipeline is closed, even if existing accounts get a long runway before it actually matters.
Why Uber specifically, and why now
The relationship between Amazon and Uber already runs deeper than most people realize. The two companies have existing agreements covering cloud computing and Zoox robotaxis, and Uber Eats is already integrated into Amazon’s Alexa+ AI assistant. Layering restaurant delivery directly into Amazon.com and the Shopping app is less a brand-new relationship and more an expansion of ties that were already there.
The no-fee-over-$25 structure and the $20-off launch promotion both point toward the same goal: making Prime feel like it’s worth its annual cost in a very tangible, immediate way. Streaming perks and faster shipping are nice, but a lot of Prime members don’t think about those benefits day to day. A delivery discount they can use on a Tuesday night when they don’t want to cook is the kind of perk people actually notice and talk about.
Grubhub’s own situation adds another layer
It’s worth remembering that Grubhub wasn’t exactly sitting still while Amazon reconsidered the relationship. The company changed hands once already, moving from Just Eat Takeaway to Wonder, and is reportedly exploring an IPO as its next move. Losing Amazon’s Prime integration, which brought a built-in subscriber base without Grubhub having to do its own customer acquisition, is a meaningfully worse position to be heading into a public offering from. Whether this changes Wonder’s IPO timeline or valuation expectations is the kind of question that usually only becomes clear months later, once the filings themselves start revealing how much of Grubhub’s order volume actually came through the Amazon channel.
Uber, meanwhile, picks up a built-in customer base without having to spend heavily on acquiring it. Prime’s US membership numbers are enormous, and even a modest conversion rate from existing Prime members trying Uber Eats for the first time through this integration represents a significant jump in order volume for a delivery business that competes constantly on marketing spend and promotional discounts to win new users.
What nobody said out loud
Neither company disclosed the financial terms of the new Uber Eats deal, and both the Amazon and Grubhub statements about the split came from unnamed spokespeople rather than named executives. An Amazon spokesperson said the company continuously evaluates its third-party offers and identified an opportunity to offer, in their words, an even better restaurant delivery experience. That’s corporate language for “we found a better deal,” without any specifics on what made it better.
It’s also worth noting this plays out against a backdrop where e-commerce platforms are all racing to lock in exclusive delivery and shopping arrangements, not unlike TikTok’s quiet launch of a standalone shopping app in Southeast Asia this same week. Everyone’s trying to own more of the transaction, end to end, rather than sharing it across multiple partners.
The timing also fits a broader habit Amazon has shown lately: trading several overlapping third-party arrangements for one deeper, more integrated relationship that touches multiple parts of the business at once. Instead of a narrow delivery contract sitting off to the side, this folds food delivery into the same relationship that already covers cloud computing, robotaxis, and voice assistant integration. That’s a very different kind of partnership than the one it’s replacing, and it gives Amazon a much stronger negotiating hand the next time terms come up, since Uber now has several reasons to keep Amazon happy rather than just one.
The bottom line
Amazon didn’t just swap delivery vendors here. It closed out a multi-year financial relationship with Grubhub that included an equity stake, survived a change of ownership, and finally ended once a better partner showed up with deeper existing ties to Amazon’s own ecosystem. The $20 promo is a nice incentive, but the real story is how much consolidation is happening in food delivery behind the scenes while most people only notice the app icon that changed.
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