When this year’s festive season arrived, it wasn’t just the quick commerce and ecommerce carts or gold marketplaces that saw a rush. A new kind of festive frenzy unfolded inside India’s apartments — on quick services apps.

Platforms offering instant home services — on-demand cleaners, cooks, and domestic help available within 10–15 minutes — recorded their sharpest surge yet in October.

Industry sources say the segment collectively clocked around 8 lakh transactions this month driven by Diwali-led cleaning sprees, visiting guests, and absentee regular maids.

Leading the pack was Urban Company, which logged about 4.5 lakh transactions across four cities — Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad.

That translates to roughly 65% of the platform-based domestic help market, according to insiders who have seen Urban Company’s internal data but are not authorised to speak to the media.

Similarly, Lightspeed-backed Snabbit, which pioneered the 15-minute professional services model, saw a big surge, handling 40,000-50,000 bookings. Pronto, another leading player in the space, clocked 30,000 orders during the festive season, sources claimed.

Snabbit founder and CEO Aayush Aggarwal told Inc42, “High-frequency services is a $45 Bn industry with less than 2% digital penetration, growing at double-digit CAGR. We are looking at the biggest tech revolution in consumer technology this decade. This is paving the way for urban India’s last major offline habit,” Agarwal told Inc42.

Together, these quick services platforms have turned India’s informal domestic help economy into a new, tech-enabled vertical with the players competing on the metrics like discounts, professionals onboarding, order volumes/ values and growth strategies.

Festive Momentum For Urban Company

Given their relative novelty in the Indian startup ecosystem, this was the first major peak season test of the quick services segment. So the festive momentum comes at a pivotal time.

Analysts attribute the spike to seasonal factors such as the absenteeism surge during festivals, with urban families facing higher disruptions, prompting a shift to app-based, verified professionals who are at their doorsteps in 10-15 minutes.

Urban Company, Snabbit, Pronto among others are capitalising on this by formalising the informal gig economy, offering shift-based help with tech-enabled matching in metro cities.

However, one big challenge is that the average order value of the segment remained at a modest INR 180-200 (exclusive of discounts), sources claimed, which means this is a volume game. And therefore the focus of most of these platforms is on high-frequency........

© Inc42