The Ground Reality For The Gig Workers Powering India’s Instant Help Boom

It’s festive season again and in Bengaluru’s upscale neighbourhoods, the sight of women in colourful uniforms — black, purple, pink or green — is becoming too commonplace to ignore. Most of these women, gig workers for the likes of Urban Company, Snabbit or Pronto, are stationed just outside the gates of the large community that they visit routinely. 

Many of them spend hours waiting for the next order or a ride back home. In inclement weather, there’s no shelter or cover. Some sit on the back of a parked motorbike or perch themselves at a bus stop if there’s one nearby. Many often mill at roadside tea stalls, if they find a safe space. 

That last part is key. A few have taken to the steps of a nearby temple, phone in hand, scrolling, waiting for the next booking to land so that they are finally able to earn their dues of the day.

“Typically, the waiting can stretch for hours and even though we are out of our homes for a living, we don’t earn anything unless an order is placed. When someone books the service it is assigned to the nearest professional or the one who can reach you within 10 minutes,” said Jhanki Devi (name changed on request) who works with Urban Company’s InstaHelp vertical. 

On a good day, she completes 4-5 hours of household work within a single gated community but on most days, this is not enough to meet her app commitments. She then has to continue being logged in to go to the home where the next order comes from.  Gig workers along the way keep the chain going, because if she can’t find the right bus, she has to book an auto or a bike taxi using Namma Yatri, Uber or Rapido. 

While the scene of gig workers outside prominent gated communities has become ubiquitous in dense residential neighbourhoods in Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi NCR, not much focus has landed on the plight of the gig workers fuelling this boom. With another festive season upon us, it’s pertinent to see where things are headed. 

Because just under a year ago, Inc42 wrote about the festive season rush that created the instant help category. Now the rush in 2026 is taking Snabbit, Urban Company and Pronto to expand, grow more profitable and extract more from its gig worker base. 

In Diwali 2025, when the category was still finding its feet, the focus was on bringing in more workers. Now this Diwali, the category doesn’t need a festive season to prove itself; the focus is on maximisation. 

Order volumes touched record highs in August, weeks before the festive season began.

A nearly 6x rise in consolidated order volumes has been seen since October 2025, i.e. from 8 Lakh monthly bookings to more than 50 Lakh bookings in July 2026.

The upcoming festive season will further lead to a spike in bookings and the need for the overall industry to meet the demand, but it’s not just about adding more workers, there’s also some focus on maximising revenue. And in this churn, gig workers are getting squeezed even further..

A New Growth Era For Instant Help

Speaking to Inc42, Bengaluru-based Pronto’s spokesperson said the company’s professionals served more than 1.5 Mn bookings in August alone across 10 cities — up from 1.25 Mn, 950,000 and roughly 837,000 in the three months before that. 

One year ago, Pronto had operations in two cities and about 20 micromarkets, serving a few thousand bookings a day. But this 5x growth in terms of city presence was expensive. 

Pronto closed its Series B funding round at $45 Mn (₹425.3 Cr) in May 2026, led by Physical Intelligence founder Lachy Groom. The startup raised the round at a valuation of $200 Mn (₹1,890 Cr), double compared to $100 Mn at which it reportedly raised funds just a few months prior in March 2026.

Similarly, Snabbit raised $56 Mn (about ₹527 Cr) in its Series D round co-led by Susquehanna Venture Capital, Mirae Asset Venture Investments and Bertelsmann India Investments. These big deals have fuelled the latest round of growth, but will this growth last or will these startups turn profitable?

Even Urban Company, which has well over a decade of operational experience in home services, has not managed to turn profitable when it comes to instant services.  

All three platforms are still in the red, competing on discounts to hold onto share, and all three depend on the same scarce resource to keep it going:women willing to do this work, at the pay and on the terms currently on offer. 

Founders and investors believe the boom isn’t because of discounts alone or funding-fuelled customer acquisition, but in fact is possible due to a consistent supply of gig workers. This in turn allows companies to expand into new cities without spending too heavily. 

So, a year on since the advent of instant help services, it’s pertinent to see how satisfied the workers are when it comes to earnings, social security benefits and working conditions.

Inc42 has sent a detailed questionnaire to Snabbit and Urban Company on the payment structures, leave policies and other welfare initiatives for its partners. We will update the story as and when these companies respond, but based on our interviews with workers and some insiders in the companies, here’s where things stand. 

Urban Company’s Tier-Based Payouts

When Insta Help launched in March 2025, the pitch to workers was straightforward: a promised, largely assured monthly income for showing up. 

Urban Company assured a minimum of ₹20,000 per month, contingent on a worker logging 132 hours in that month.

That’s not how it works today. 

Partners are now grouped into tiers  described to us as diamond, gold and silver, based on customer ratings and the number of hours logged on the app.

“I working as a diamond tier professional, hence some of the benefits like access to more orders, salary cuts if we take more leaves than sanction within 15 days or a month period and earnings are better than those who are in the other tiers,” one professional, working in a North Bengaluru locality, said. 

She said that the volume of orders for any worker is tied to ratings within that tier and this can translate into better pay if the worker consistently gets high ratings .

Meanwhile, Urban Company’s claims of assured salary were disputed by a majority of the workers who told us that the company follows the broader industry wage structure now. This means tying payments to logged-in hours and customer ratings.

Notably, InstaHelp currently advertises an assured income of ₹20,000–25,000 a month at an hourly rate of ₹150–180, with the company’s own claim that its top 5% of workers earn more than ₹50,000 a month.

Inc42 could not independently verify whether any workers in Bengaluru earn that high an amount every month.

Meanwhile, an independent survey of workers from March 2026 put InstaHelp’s average monthly pay at roughly ₹21,000 for an eight-hour day.

This is in the same range the company cites — and separately the survey found that a worker who logs out mid-shift for an emergency can be docked a full day’s pay, not just for the hours missed. 

The payout, according to the UC InstaHelp workers we spoke to, comes every 15 days or every 30 days, depending on the tier. Plus. earnings are strictly tied to being logged in 6 to 8 hours each day of the month. The company permits workers only two days of paid leaves a month, and these days are not accounted for when payouts are calculated. 

Inside A 12-Hour Snabbit Day

Snabbit is not publicly listed and as such the company is not obligated to disclose how many workers it currently engages for instant help services. 

The company’s public numbers have stayed in a fairly narrow band over the past year, even as its order volumes multiplied more than tenfold. 

After its Series B round in May 2025, Snabbit said workers on a 12-hour shift earned “upward of ₹40,000” a month, with four hours a day translating to just over ₹10,000. By its Series C round that October, the figure being quoted had shifted to a ₹25,000–30,000 every month. 

However, this pay was still hour-linked, and most certainly not fixed. 

Snabbit’s annual revenue rate is said to have been around $11 Mn at its peak in 2025 (FY26) and as per media reports, it’s currently on track to achieve close to $40 Mn in revenue by the end of the ongoing FY27 fiscal year.  

But Snabbit has not disclosed its audited financials for the past fiscal year (FY26) and without this, it’s hard to verify these numbers.  

Earlier this year, Snabbit’s CEO Aayush Agarwal claimed that time spent on the app has increased by 50%, and the company is said to have displaced Urban Company in terms of monthly order volume with 1.5 Mn orders in the month of June 2026

Snabbit has onboarded more than 15,000 workers just this year, according to numbers reviewed by Inc42. 

But the pay structure, according to four Snabbit workers we spoke to, has remained unchanged since last year.

Social media posts have alleged that Snabbit workers lose an average of ₹1000 for every day of missed work. This repeatedly came up during our conversations with workers, but Agarwal had denied that any such policy exists in previous statements. 

Is Pronto Any Different Than The Others?

The youngest company of the trio told Inc42 that its professionals earn a fixed component every month, which is linked to the hours they work and a variable component tied to completed bookings, with a 12-hour day resulting in an average ₹1,000 payout for workers. 

“There is no promised fixed minimum monthly salary. Earnings depend on the availability and how much work a professional takes on,” the company said in an emailed statement to Inc42. 

The worker-side app breaks down each day’s earnings and any deductions in real time. 

Separately, Pronto’s own in-app pricing has been reported to be as low as ₹1 an hour for first-time bookings and around ₹50 an hour for utensil-cleaning bookings. This pricing floor raises its own questions about how this claimed fixed-plus-variable structure would hold up, when the customer-side pricing is so aggressive.

Pronto is one of the most aggressive when it comes to discounts in the space. Its discounts are primarily funded from the company’s balance sheet, not impacting the worker wage structures, the company claimed. 

But again, this is not a company that has disclosed its financials in the past fiscal year i.e FY26. These claims will only be tested and the company’s confidence in its business model can only be justified when the numbers are out in the open. 

The Unpaid Hours In Between

Beyond work hours, what becomes even more challenging for a worker on the field is the waiting time between jobs. This part of the job is not paid.

Pronto founder and CEO Anjali Sardana had earlier stated that the waiting period roughly constitutes 13-20% of the working day on average.

But our conversations with instant help workers revealed going to and fro bookings is largely left to the worker themselves. Most rely on public transport, or simply walk, because the cost of an auto ride might be too high. 

Pronto, responding to our questions, said the vast majority of its workers get to their next job on foot, with a smaller share covered on Yulu bikes that the company provides in certain localities. Workers are urged to wait close to the neighbourhoods where they get bookings from, which the company says, helps reduce travel time.

Yulu CEO Amit Gupta told Inc42 earlier that the company has partnered with instant help apps in some areas and he expects the demand to increase because workers can afford the daily rental cost of ₹200 for bikes. 

Another issue plaguing gig workers currently is unavailability of waiting spots or restrooms in high demand areas, where usually access to facilities is not available. 

“We use public washrooms, wherever possible. It is a hindrance because we cannot directly ask just any customer to allow us access to their washrooms,” 28-year-old Anisa (name changed), who works with Pronto in Bengaluru, told us

Waiting outside large gated societies is not always safe and some workers have complained about safety and security risks too.

Pronto had reportedly started setting up local waiting centres or hubs in some areas of Bengaluru, however it is not clear whether these facilities are adequately distributed or have the amenities that gig workers might need. 

On the safety side, each of the platforms claim to have introduced some sort of feature within the app for workers to reach out when in distress.

However, when we asked how many such SOS complaints or queries have been fielded by these companies in the past year, we did not get a specific answer from either Pronto, Urban Company or Snabbit.

Shaik Salauddin, the national general secretary of the Indian Federation Of App Based Transport Workers (IFAT) which also looks at the welfare of other gig workers, told us that the union has received complaints from women workers related to harassment, including alleged sexual harassment by customers. The pressure of poor ratings, complaints or account suspension can force women workers to tolerate unacceptable behaviour, he added. 

“The algorithmic allocation of orders, that could also lead to pressure on women workers to accept jobs even when a location or customers feel unsafe has also been reported to us,” Salauddin added.

New Festive Season, Same Old Math

Now with another peak demand season here, instant help apps are expecting major growth numbers this year. They are working on top of a bigger base as compared to 2025, catering to millions of customers who had never heard of the app one year ago. 

But for the all-women workforce of these instant help apps, working conditions are yet to change for the better and for others, the situation is getting worse.

The real question is whether the companies will invest in infrastructure and higher incentives for workers when they see the outcome after this boom.

While platforms have invested heavily in the consumer side of the business by waging a discounts war, the companies cannot retain the workers under existing conditions and that is probably why even the instant help segment has worker supply and retention problems. 

Jhanki Devi, who was quoted earlier in the story, said candidly that the instant help industry which is entirely driven by women workers is yet to realise the challenges that women face while going about their daily work and responsibilities. She brought it back to one simple thing: menstruation leave. “In physically demanding jobs like this, we aren’t even entitled to one day of period leave. And that should tell you why many of us cannot see ourselves doing this kind of gig work for long.” 

For instant help platforms like Snabbit, Urban Company and Pronto who often pat themselves on the back for providing a platform for unemployed women, fixing these arcane practices should be the biggest priority this festive season. 

[Edited By Nikhil Subramiam]

The post The Ground Reality For The Gig Workers Powering India’s Instant Help Boom appeared first on Inc42 Media.