Why Q-comm deliveries are costing more

Delivery apps in India are raising fees due to increased electricity costs as subsidies end, impacting quick commerce and customer expenses.

MUMBAI: Over the last few months, delivery apps such as Zomato, Swiggy and Zepto have started doing a small, annoying thing. They add a fee. ₹7 here. ₹9 there. Sometimes they raise the minimum order for “free delivery”. Sometimes they don’t explain it at all.

Why Q-comm deliveries are costing more

Nothing seems to have changed. The warehouse is still nearby. The rider still shows up in 10 minutes. The app still insists this is “convenience”.

So why does speed suddenly cost more? Because the cheapest input in India’s digital economy is not labour or real estate. It is electricity. And that subsidy is ending.

Cost of convenience

Quick commerce works by compressing time. Groceries are stored closer to you. Orders are batched tightly. Delivery scooters are charged fast, together, usually in the evening, when demand peaks. What looks like software efficiency is, underneath, a very physical act: drawing large amounts of power, very quickly, from neighbourhood electricity networks that were built for homes, not warehouses.

For years, this worked because the grid absorbed the stress quietly. Transformers ran hotter. Equipment aged faster. Maintenance budgets stretched. None of this showed up on a delivery company’s balance sheet. The grid carried the cost. Consumers didn’t see it. Now they are beginning to.

A dark store behaves less like a home and more like a factory. When dozens of electric scooters plug into fast chargers simultaneously to meet delivery windows, they create sharp spikes in demand. Higher current means more heat. Heat shortens equipment life. Push the system hard enough, often enough, and failure becomes routine.

This is the quiet accounting trick at the heart of the quick commerce economy. Delivery platforms book speed as efficiency. The electricity grid absorbs wear and tear elsewhere. Eventually, someone pays.

Mumbai complicates this story. The city’s grid is unusually resilient, thanks to decades of investment and its islanding system. The lights usually stay on. But resilience is not free. When the grid holds, the stress does not disappear. It shows up as higher costs.

As T Venkatram, who was part of the leadership team at Ashok Leyland and one of the pioneers of Electric Vehicles (EV) in India, puts it: “We are pretending that charging, storage and delivery are software problems. They are grid problems.” EVs intensify the issue. Battery costs are coming down, and governments across the world have rushed to subsidise EV adoption. But building subsidies is easier than building infrastructure. France learnt this the hard way after an early EV push ran into grid constraints. “It’s like setting up petrol bunks and then discovering there’s no petrol,” Venkatram says.

Absence of standardisation

India’s deeper problem is standardisation. Batteries are not interchangeable. There is no equivalent of a universal AA cell for scooters. Every manufacturer builds its own charging ecosystem. Every delivery hub becomes its own miniature power centre, pulling electricity when everyone else does.

China, often cited as the EV model, keeps multiple fuel and technology options open and has pushed battery swapping at scale for two-wheelers. India has not. The result is a grid that carries the cost of experimentation. That cost is now being priced in.

With smart meters and new Time-of-Use tariffs under the Electricity (Amendment) Bill, 2025, utilities are learning to say no. Power drawn during peak evening hours costs significantly more. Clusters that pull too much power too fast are penalised. For delivery hubs, this changes the economics overnight.

To cope, platforms are installing large battery banks. They charge them at night, when power is cheaper, and discharge during peak hours. This avoids penalties but adds hardware, maintenance and financing costs. Analysts estimate that once these are accounted for, the real cost of fulfilling an order rises by ₹15 to ₹20.

Consumers do not see this line item. They see platform fees. Higher cart thresholds. Delivery charges that weren’t there before.

In cities where the grid is weaker, this stress shows up as power cuts. In cities where the grid holds, it shows up as higher prices. Either way, the subsidy is over.

The ten-minute delivery promise was funded by cheap, patient electricity. India built a patient grid, not a fast one. Quick commerce worked by borrowing that patience from public infrastructure.

That borrowing phase is ending. The grid is no longer absorbing the cost of speed. It is passing it on. And for the first time, the bill is landing exactly where it was always headed. With the customer.