Bengaluru: On-demand house-help platforms Snabbit and Urban Company’s InstaHelp crossed one lakh completed jobs each on Sunday, as competition in the young category pushed the price of an hour’s household work to as little as Rs 29 in some locations.Snabbit said it had completed over 1.15 lakh jobs by 6.50 pm on August 2. The number was expected to rise further before the end of the day.Urban Company separately said InstaHelp crossed one lakh delivered orders at 5.54 pm. It, too, expected the final count to be higher. The company described it as a peak-day figure and said sustained performance would depend on repeat usage, service quality and the availability of workers.The milestones came amid steep promotional pricing. App screenshots reviewed by TOI showed Urban Company offering 30 minutes of InstaHelp Standard for Rs 19, while 45-minute and one-hour bookings were priced at Rs 29 at the location checked. The app displayed these as discounts of as much as 88% from regular prices.Snabbit was also offering a one-hour booking for Rs 29 in some locations, according to screenshots shared on social media.By around 7 pm, however, Urban Company’s app showed instant service as unavailable at the location checked. The earliest available slot was the following morning. InstaHelp otherwise promises to send a worker within 10-15 minutes for chores such as sweeping, mopping, dishwashing, laundry and basic meal preparation.Urban Company launched InstaHelp as a pilot in Mumbai in March 2025. The service is now available in select neighbourhoods across major metros.“Crossing 100,000 delivered orders in a single day, barely five months after we crossed 50,000, reflects both the growing consumer demand for InstaHelp and the strength of the operating model we’ve built,” Urban Company co-founder and CEO Abhiraj Singh Bhal said.Snabbit has scaled from around 400 daily jobs to over one lakh in less than two years. It completed four million house-help jobs during the April-June quarter, including 1.51 million in June.The company said its average net order value, the amount customers paid after discounts across new and existing users, was above Rs 130 during the quarter. Its cash burn per completed job fell by more than Rs 100 from the preceding quarter to below Rs 250.Snabbit operates across 10 cities and over 150 micro-markets, with more than 25,000 workers on its platform.“Two years ago, most believed high-frequency home services could never become a scaled technology business,” founder and CEO Aayush Agarwal said. He added that some large residential communities were now generating over 500 jobs a day, while mature neighbourhood clusters had crossed 2,500 daily jobs.
