Study: Delivery Apps Keep Pay a Mystery for Riders

India's quick commerce boom — apps that promise groceries at your door in ten minutes — runs on a huge army of delivery riders. Researchers from Indian institutions studied how these workers actually get paid. They built a simple chatbot called GigSaathi that let riders upload screenshots of their earnings, which the team turned into clear pay records over time. They also gathered bonus data from Blinkit stores in New Delhi.

What they found is unsettling. Base pay, bonuses, working hours and distances travelled all varied enormously from day to day. A big chunk of a rider's income depends on variables the app never explains. Blinkit, the biggest player in the sector, doesn't guarantee any minimum base pay per kilometre. Bonuses, meanwhile, average about a quarter of weekly earnings but swing widely, and the app seems to use them to steer behaviour — orders that already pay well per delivery come with smaller bonus shares.

Most striking: how long a delivery takes barely predicts what it pays. Riders aren't compensated proportionally for their time. Since nobody can reverse-engineer the algorithm, workers end up chasing bonuses they don't understand, hoping for more money that isn't guaranteed. The researchers call this 'forced volatility' — unpredictable pay that functions as a tool of control rather than fair reward.

Why should you care if you don't live in India? This is the clearest picture yet of how algorithmic gig work behaves everywhere. The same opaque pay systems power food delivery, ride-hailing and warehouse shifts in the US and Europe. As more companies promise instant delivery, the question of who bears the risk when pay becomes a lottery is coming to your neighbourhood too.