It was a Saturday, and Shivani Mathur was gearing up for the day when she received a voice note on WhatsApp from her house help: “Didi, aaj main nahi aaungi (I won’t be coming today).” From experience, she knew a message like that could not be argued with. But this Saturday was different. She had guests coming over.
The 43-year-old, who lives in a high-rise society in Noida, quickly turned to her tower’s residents’ group chat and asked if anyone could send their house help to help her out.
“Try Urban Clap’s InstaHelp na. They’ll send someone within 10 to 15 minutes,” someone replied.
Soon after, a woman in a purple uniform rang her doorbell and took charge. She cleaned the house, washed the dishes, and even helped with kitchen prep. She kneaded the dough, chopped vegetables, cleaned coriander and mint leaves for the chutney. Everything was done in almost two hours, and under Rs 200. Since being introduced to the service, it has become her go-to option whenever her regular house help is on leave.
People are increasingly turning to apps like Snabbit, Urban Company and Pronto whenever their regular house help is on leave or when an extra pair of hands is needed.
Mathur is not alone. Across urban India, households are increasingly turning to apps whenever their regular house help is on leave or when an extra pair of hands is needed. What was once managed through neighbourhood networks and phone calls is now resolved with a few taps on a screen.
Get a house help at your doorstep in 10 minutes
This is an expansion of the digital roster of essentials in modern Indian homes. After Ola and Uber for instant commuting, Zomato and Swiggy for instant food delivery, MakeMyTrip and Goibibo for instant travel bookings, Blinkit, BigBasket and Instamart for instant groceries, and YesMadam and UrbanClap for instant salon services at home, there are now apps that let you call a house help to your doorstep within 10 minutes.
Snabbit, Pronto, Urban Clap’s Insta Help, and Broomies are among the top players in the instant domestic help space and are already popular in cities like Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Pune. Snabbit grew from 1 lakh orders a month in August to 3 lakh in October and is now close to completing 8.5 lakh orders in February. Urban Company’s ‘instant maid service’, InstaHelp, launched in March 2025, reached a new milestone on February 22, crossing 50,000 daily bookings.
Screenshots from the apps Snabbit and Urban Company’s InstaHelp respectively.
Need someone to do the dishes for the day? Want help clearing that huge pile of clothes from the bed and neatly arranging them in the wardrobe? Or someone to clean up the house the morning after a long, chaotic party? Planning to treat your kids to gajar ka halwa but dreading the laborious task of grating carrots? These are the everyday problems the instant house help industry, India’s next ambitious market in the making, is trying to solve.
The process is fairly simple: download the app, request an instant service (or schedule it in advance), select the number of hours required, and that’s it. The cost? Even more unbelievable. For Rs 100, you can get an hour of service from a trained professional on Urban Company. On Snabbit, you can opt for a package of Rs 149 for three one-hour visits, which comes to about Rs 50 per hour of service.
These startups operate through networks of gig workers who, after background verification and basic training, receive job requests on their mobile apps, just like cab drivers working with platforms such as Uber or Ola.
Better pay, more respect
The workers, who are mostly women, are in a major win situation. At least for now. They get a fixed monthly pay of somewhere between Rs 22,000 to Rs 30,000 for a full day of work.
“The pay is really good. I get Rs 30,000 from Urban Company in two installments of Rs 15,000 each month,” says Sunita*, who has been associated with Urban Company for the last six months and works near a posh, high-rise society in Noida Sector 121.
“I have to complete eight hours of service. They don’t have to be done in one stretch – it’s up to me which duties I take and which ones I skip. I no longer have to stick to a fixed schedule. Earlier, I had to start my day at 6 am. Now, I can cook for my family, send my children to school, and begin taking duties after the 8 am slot,” she says.
While Sunita works in a high-demand residential area where she can easily pick up enough duties to complete her eight hours, demand in many other areas may not be as strong. However, that does not affect their fixed salary.
Workers don’t even have to commit to eight hours a day. They can opt for a two-hour model instead, where the fixed salary is lower (around Rs 10,000), but they can earn bonuses by accepting job requests on the platform. This model also helps startups like Snabbit operate sustainably in low-demand areas.
If anything goes wrong while on duty at a customer’s home, workers have access to an SOS feature on their mobile apps. They can also file complaints if they face any issues.
Inside Urban Company’s InstaHelp feature.
“People can be unreasonable at times. Once, a customer asked me to clean the toilet without a brush. How is that even possible? I can’t clean it with just a tissue or a cloth. I raised a complaint, and the customer immediately received a call from the office to intervene,” shares Sunita, adding that these issues don’t occur often.
There are other benefits like referral bonus, joining bonus and health insurance as well.
Respect is another key bonus. While speaking to a worker associated with Urban Company’s InstaHelp, 37-year-old Rani said that wearing the uniform makes her feel respected.
Too good to be true pay as well as price – how?
But if these companies charge customers Rs 50 to Rs 100 per hour of service, how are they able to pay workers significantly more while still inching toward profitability? Well, Urban Company’s loss story, despite an increase in scale and number of jobs in Q3 FY 2026, says a lot. It reported an EBITDA loss of Rs 61 crore in its InstaHelp vertical, as reported by Financial Express.
For these startups, scale and demand are surely increasing. But money-making is still a pain point. Currently, the startups are also riding high on VC funding. Snabbit has raised over $56 million from marquee investors, including Bertelsmann India Investments, Lightspeed, Elevation Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners. Pronto has secured more than $13 million within a year of launch, backed by General Catalyst, Glade Brook Capital, and Bain Capital Ventures.
Industry experts, however, believe that the revenue model will eventually change. Right now, companies are chasing scale over profitability. As a result, workers are earning more than they would in traditional arrangements, and customers are enjoying convenience at low rates.
“Eventually, when the focus shifts to profitability, which is likely to happen once demand stabilises and supply becomes sufficient, the sector is expected to follow a familiar trajectory seen in other platform-based businesses in India, like what happened with the cab aggregators and food delivery partners. Once demand picked up and the platforms scaled, those incentives were cut and earnings dropped. Food delivery followed a similar path, with per-order payouts gradually reduced after the initial growth phase.
“The hope is that the pay will taper down. One, platforms will take away fixed economics. Two, incentives will be narrowed over time, because today, these incentives actually make the platform job much better than a full-time job,” Amit Aggarwal, formerly with Elevation Capital, which has backed Urban Company and Snabbit, told The Morning Context.
The cost may also increase for consumers. An upward revision in pricing seems inevitable, considering Urban Company’s current charge of Rs 99 per hour is after a 60 per cent discount.
But will people still pay when the too-good-to-be-true prices disappear? Or will these companies manage to edge out the existing offline market with their initial, genie-like convenience before that happens? The consumber behaviour has started to shift, and that may well be a hint of what’s to come.
– Ends
Published By:
Medha Chawla
Published On:
Feb 25, 2026