The newest contender in the Indian quick-service market is instant home-service platforms. Built for convenience for the average urban consumer, these platforms provide labour assistance within 10 to 15 minutes. From washing utensils to shelling peas, these platforms have a trained workforce that provides domestic labour help instantly.
With extremely affordable services, these platforms—be it Urban Company's Instahelp, Snabbit, or Pronto—claim they pay their gig workers much more than regular workers. These companies seem to be primarily focused on customer acquisition and market expansion. And that raises questions about the sustainability of workers' wages and current service pricing.
Snabbit, an all-women instant home-service platform, announced last week that it raised around ₹531 crore ($56 million) in a Series D funding round. Initially, Snabbit offered services for as low as ₹150 for 3 hours while simultaneously paying its workers around ₹22,000 to ₹40,000 a month (for 8 to 12 hours a day). The offer period has ended, and the company reportedly burned through around ₹75.9 crore per month during that time.
"There was a time when we were obviously playing the discount game with regard to competition, but now that's significantly reduced. Today, rather than chasing frequency of orders through promotional pricing, the focus has turned squarely to improving average order value (AOV)," Aayush Agarwal, Snabbit's founder, recently told Inc42.
However, the platform still offers cheap services starting at ₹169 per hour (for cleaning and dishwashing) and relies heavily on VC funding to do so.
A similar fate follows Urban Company's Instahelp and Pronto, Snabbit's direct competitors. Instahelp workers earn an assured income of around ₹20,000 to ₹25,000 per month with an hourly rate of ₹150-180, and claims that the top 5 per cent of its workers earn around ₹50,000 per month. Instahelp reportedly loses an estimated ₹381 per order, based on the EBITDA loss of ₹61 crore in Q3 2025.
Bangalore-based Pronto also offers the most aggressive pricing, with as low as ₹1 per hour for initial cleaning and approximately ₹50 per hour for utensils. They are also funded by venture capital, and promise an assured income of ₹22,000 to ₹30,000 per month for gig workers.
As these companies increasingly attract workers to join their platforms, their long-term wage sustainability is questionable. These platforms are active across cities such as Mumbai, Thane, Delhi, Gurugram, Noida, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai, and Kolkata. Comparing the regular wages in these cities, gig work seems like a golden opportunity for domestic workers.
Workers in Mumbai, Pune, Noida, and Bengaluru earn an average of ₹117–₹160 per hour for just cleaning and dishwashing, depending on the area and the house. In cities like Chennai, Ahmedabad, and Ghaziabad, workers earn around an average of ₹50–₹90 per hour for cleaning and dishwashing.
These wages require workers to hold multiple jobs, often covering more than 8 houses to reach the monthly wage offered by these Instant service platforms. However, even within platform-based work, many workers are compelled to juggle multiple households across different locations to meet earning targets. While traditional domestic labour wages offer a relatively stable income, the higher wages offered by instant platforms depend on continued investor funding.
As the focus gradually shifts from aggressive discounting, the pressure can shift onto workers’ earnings and incentives. Without a clear path to revenue, the burden of profitability could ultimately affect fair wages for the growing number of workers joining the platform or make services more expensive for consumers, questioning the viability of the entire model.
