India’s on-demand economy has a new obsession: househelp in 10 minutes. What food delivery did for meals, startups now want to do for cleaning, dishwashing, and daily chores. And judging by order numbers, it’s clearly working. But beneath the speed lies a deeper problem — cash burn driven by manpower stress.
Urban India is changing fast.
Nuclear families and smaller households
Double-income working couples
Higher disposable incomes
Growing discomfort with long-term maid dependency
Consumers don’t want to schedule househelp anymore. They want it now.
That’s where platforms like Urban Company, Snabbit, and Pronto come in — promising househelp within ~10 minutes.
August order volumes
Urban Company: ~2,09,000 orders
Snabbit: ~1,00,000 orders
Pronto: ~25,000–30,000 orders
October order volumes
Urban Company: ~4,68,000 orders
Snabbit: ~3,10,000 orders
Pronto: ~66,000 orders
📈 Combined segment orders jumped from ~2.3 million in August to ~5.7 million by October, more than doubling in just two months.
This isn’t gradual adoption — it’s explosive consumer pull.
Estimated Market Size : $30-40 Billion with a YOY Growth rate of 12-14%.
No dependency on full-time maids
Fixed, transparent pricing
App-based booking and tracking
Instant availability for daily chores
Minimal friction compared to traditional househelp
For many urban households, this is fast becoming a daily-use convenience service, not an occasional backup.
Unlike food or grocery delivery, househelp is human-intensive.
Every order requires:
A trained worker
Physical proximity to meet the 10-minute SLA
Consistent quality and reliability
But supply is struggling to keep up with demand.
Key issues:
High worker attrition
Slow onboarding and training cycles
Limited availability during peak hours
Rising competition for the same workforce
As demand scales rapidly, supply doesn’t scale at the same speed.
To keep growth and service speed intact, companies are spending aggressively on:
Worker onboarding and training
Retention bonuses and surge incentives
Customer discounts and promotional pricing
Marketing to lock in early users
While revenues are growing, costs are growing even faster.
The category today runs largely on:
Venture capital funding
Subsidised unit economics
High burn in pursuit of scale
Profitability remains a distant goal.
What investors like:
Strong repeat usage
Habit-forming behaviour
Large and under-penetrated urban market
What worries them:
Long-term manpower availability
Sustainability of unit economics
Margin pressure as competition intensifies
The consensus: The market is real. The business model is still evolving.
This is not a winner-takes-all market yet.
Faster delivery means higher burn
Slower delivery risks losing customers
Everyone is racing to build dense local supply networks
It’s a classic trade-off between speed, scale, and sustainability.
Can 10-minute househelp:
Match the reliability of food delivery?
Achieve sustainable margins?
Reduce dependency on heavy incentives?
The answer depends on one factor:
Who cracks manpower efficiency and retention first.
Demand for instant househelp is undeniably strong
Order volumes are scaling at breakneck speed
Manpower shortages are pushing costs sharply higher
The next phase will separate businesses that merely scale from those that build sustainable economics
In this race, speed got them attention. Economics will decide the winners.
