Instant help for Re 1: Pronto, Snabbit, Urban Company test new offers as sector cash burn nears Rs 150 crore in June

India's fast-growing instant home services market is increasingly borrowing a page from the quick commerce playbook, with leading platforms experimenting with Re 1 promotional offers as they compete to acquire customers in one of the country's hottest consumer internet categories.

The competitive intensity in instant services is beginning to mirror the early days of quick commerce, when Blinkit, Swiggy's Instamart and Zepto relied on aggressive discounts and promotions to win market share from incumbents such as BigBasket, Flipkart and Amazon.

In the quick services market, Pronto, Snabbit and Urban Company's Insta Help have all, at different points, sold select home services for as little as Re 1, as per several screenshots reviewed by Moneycontrol.

These campaigns were, however, limited in scope and do not form part of the companies' standard pricing strategy. There were also restrictions around geography, user eligibility or duration. It is also possible these are limited time offers and will be discontinued in phases as user stickiness picks up.

However, the competitive pricing has led monthly cash burn to stay elevated. The collective cash burn, between Snabbit, Urban Company’s Insta Help and Pronto, was between Rs 140 and Rs 150 crore (around 14.5-16 million) during the month of June, up about around 25-40 percent from April, industry sources told Moneycontrol.

"Our burn in the month of June was less than $3 million. Our burn per order continues to be best in class and we expect it to continue to decline month-on-month," a Pronto spokesperson told Moneycontrol.

Urban Company and Snabbit did not reply to Moneycontrol’s queries.

As companies race to capture market share, they are experimenting with aggressive promotions to attract new users.

Pronto's offer, for instance, ran a Re 1 campaign for about a week in June. While it was restricted to select geographies and applied only to new users booking a 30-minute service it generated additional sales. Sources close to the company said such promotions resulted in around 1,000 orders of Re 1 each.

Such campaigns are largely deployed when companies enter new markets and promote their offerings to acquire customers, industry sources said.

The promotions have taken several forms. Snabbit has advertised "unlimited bookings" starting at Rs 99 an hour through its Pink Pass subscription, while screenshots reviewed by Moneycontrol also show the company offering 60-minute bookings for free and 90-minute bookings for Re 1 as part of promotional campaigns.

Urban Company's Insta Help previously advertised a "Try at Re 1" campaign using a promotional code. It, however, ran that offer for a short period of time as an experiment but later discontinued the offering.

Pronto, meanwhile, has advertised introductory offers such as the first three bookings at Rs 25 each, while screenshots from its app also showed 30-minute scheduled bookings priced at Re 1, alongside discounts on longer-duration services.

“The other instance where services would be offered for Re 1 would be when a company wants to rectify a bad experience from a previous order," a second person, directly involved in the industry, told Moneycontrol.

These are targeted offerings and run for a short period. They do not reflect a company’s pricing policy, Moneycontrol has learnt. That reflects in average order values (AOV). The AOVs across Snabbit, Pronto and Urban Company's Insta Help are all in the Rs 80-120 range, according to people familiar with the matter, which makes the competition even more intense as companies rush to grab a larger share of a customer’s wallet.

The Re 1 campaigns represent only a small fraction of overall orders, sometimes less than 1% of total monthly orders – which across categories – totaled to almost 4 million orders in June, as reported by Moneycontrol. The promotional campaigns come as competition in the category continues to intensify.

Snabbit completed 1.51 million orders in June, narrowly ahead of Urban Company's Insta Help business, which completed around 1.5 million orders, while Pronto handled more than 950,000 orders, according to figures obtained by Moneycontrol.

The figures could not be independently verified.

The category has also scaled rapidly. Combined monthly active users across Urban Company, Pronto and Snabbit crossed 10 million in March, according to a Morgan Stanley report.

The brokerage estimated Urban Company had 6.5 million monthly active users in March, followed by Pronto at 2.7 million and Snabbit at 1.2 million.

The race has attracted significant investor interest. Snabbit raised $56 million in April in a funding round led by Mirae Asset and SIG, while Pronto completed a $20 million extension to its Series B funding in May after raising $25 million earlier, taking its total Series B raise to $45 million. Urban Company, meanwhile, has continued stepping up investments in its Insta Help business.

Growth has come at a cost as companies prioritise expansion. During its fourth-quarter FY26 earnings call, Urban Company disclosed that Insta Help was losing Rs 447 per order, with cofounder and CEO Abhiraj Bhal saying investments in the business would remain elevated over the coming quarters.

“We expect InstaHelp burn to remain elevated over the next few quarters as we prioritise densification, broader micro-market coverage, and accelerated partner onboarding,” Bhal of Urban Company told analysts while announcing quarterly results.

While deep discounts have long been a feature of India's consumer internet sector, the emergence of Re 1 promotions in instant home services reflects how aggressively companies are competing for new users. At the same time, these campaigns have largely been targeted at customer acquisition or retention initiatives rather than a shift in long-term pricing strategies.