В Индии набирает популярность сервис быстрой помощи по мелким домашним задачам

Picture this: You are back from an island vacation after a week. There are three suitcases full of wrinkled clothes, some unwashed. Tomorrow you have to go back to work. All you have is this evening, and you really don't want to make sorting through the luggage your evening ritual. So you open an app on your phone. Twenty minutes later, someone knocks on your door. They unpack the suitcases, get your wrinkled clothes into one pile for ironing, put the unwashed items into the washing machine, steam and fold the remaining clothes, and put everything away in your wardrobe. In less than an hour, the chore is done, and they leave. You have the rest of the evening to yourself. This would have been unimaginable five years ago. But not today. In fact, people living in metropolitan cities in India are hiring help for household micro tasks as small as peeling peas and cleaning toilets. Rising demand for micro task helpers in metropolitan cities Hiring house help is not new for Indians. For generations, people have paid for help with cleaning, cooking and other routine chores. What is new, however, is hiring someone for micro tasks so small that they barely even register as ‘work’. Watering plants. Peeling peas for winter storage. Drying clothes from a washing machine. Before you roll your eyes, yes, that’s happening. Tasks that take fifteen minutes and cost less than a coffee have entered the gig economy, with several platforms that operate at the speed of food delivery. Snabbit, the Bangalore-based quick home services startup, provides on-demand help for micro tasks. And people are hiring these helpers for all kinds of household chores: cleaning dishes, unpacking luggage, drying clothes, cooking, and almost anything related to household chores. “There are customers who are frequent travellers and call our experts very often to unpack their suitcases,” Snabbit founder and CEO Aayush Agarwal told CNBC. This might sound absurd to some, but for those who are running short of time, this quick service is a blessing. In fact, in Delhi NCR, there is a separate customer base: people who hire help every winter to peel peas and store them in containers. This used to be a seasonal task that belonged entirely to domestic routine. But for a working couple, spending hours on such a tedious chore can feel like an unnecessary drain on their limited free time. So they open the app, pay for the help, and consider the task sorted. “There are customers who call our experts to help them dry clothes from the washing machine,” he added. This chore would have been considered small; it barely warranted conversation three years ago. But for working professionals and those with packed schedules, this is a saviour. Micro tasks that we ‘never imagined’ being outsourced, such as watering plants, are now being handled by on-demand household help. The startup also tested supplying cooks in Bangalore, who would arrive on demand. They launched it under a pseudonym, and according to Agarwal, it was quite successful. “An average customer was using us roughly 3.5 times a month. There were primary and secondary cases emerging. Retention was extremely strong. The NPS was very high. We ran it for six months within a micro market, scaled it to roughly 200 jobs a day, and now we've decided to fold it into our platform,” he said. Their goal is now to scale into other categories like cooking, childcare, elderly care, and drivers. “Anything where you can imagine someone to show up in like 10-15 minutes, help you out.” Rising demand, more competitors The rising demand has, of course, grabbed the attention of many investors, and now there are many players in the market. Delhi NCR-based home services startup Pronto is one. The platform promises trained, background-verified professionals within ten to fifteen minutes across eleven Indian cities. Pre-party cleaning before guests arrive. Post-party chaos wiped away by morning. Refrigerators organised, kitchen cabinets sorted, bathrooms scrubbed, wardrobes folded. Whatever the household chore demands, they provide. Ritika, a Sector 57 resident who availed herself of the on-demand help service from the platform, described the service as ‘seamless’. “Seamless experience from booking to completion. The staff was courteous, punctual, and did a fantastic job,” she said in a review listed on the company’s website. Founded by 23-year-old Anjali Sardana, Pronto was handling upwards of eighteen thousand bookings daily by mid-2026, with most bookings from NCR, which includes cities surrounding New Delhi. And yet, Sardana feels the domestic services market is predominantly offline. “I still believe that 99.99% of this market is completely offline. In aggregate, less than 100,000 people are using a service like this per day, while tens of millions of households rely on offline arrangements,” she told TechCrunch. Given that, the company’s valuation reached around $100 million in less than 12 months, all because of the rising demand. In a matter of years, this on-demand quick help service is expected to mushroom in smaller cities.