Ask a chemist what his delivery costs and he will say "nothing, the boy does it". The boy has a salary. The boy has a bike. The boy spends forty minutes a day standing at the counter waiting for a bag. The cost is real; it is just not written anywhere.
When you build a platform that promises medicine from the neighbourhood pharmacy delivered in minutes, you do not get to leave it unwritten. Here is the arithmetic. Every number is an assumption and I have marked it as one, so you can cross it out and put in your own.
The assumptions
| Item | Assumption | Why this number |
|---|---|---|
| Rider wage | ₹22,000 a month, full time, including incentives | Mid-range for a two-wheeler rider in Bengaluru in 2026 |
| Working days | 26 a month | Six-day week |
| Hours on shift | 9 a day | Includes idle time between orders |
| Two-wheeler mileage | 45 km per litre | A typical 100cc bike |
| Petrol | about ₹100 a litre | Rounded; it moves. Current metro prices are published by the Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell |
| Distance per order | 5 km | 2 km to the customer, 2 km back or on to the next, 1 km of repositioning |
| Other rider costs | ₹1,500 a month | Insurance, maintenance, phone data, bag |
| Failed deliveries | 1 in 20 | Customer not home, wrong address, order cancelled at the door |
What one order takes in time
| Step | Time |
|---|---|
| Wait at the counter for the bag | 6 minutes |
| Ride 2 km in city traffic at about 15 km/h | 8 minutes |
| Hand over, collect payment if any, photograph proof | 3 minutes |
| Return or reposition | 6 minutes |
| Total | about 23 minutes |
Twenty-three minutes means a rider can do a little over two and a half orders an hour when orders are waiting for him. They are not always waiting. Across a nine-hour shift with a lunch break and quiet stretches, a realistic average is somewhere between twelve and twenty completed orders a day for a busy area, and far fewer for a single shop on its own.
The cost per order
Fuel is easy: 5 km at 45 km per litre is about 0.11 litres, so about ₹11 an order. Other rider costs at ₹1,500 a month over roughly 340 orders are about ₹4 an order. Those two lines barely move. The line that moves is the wage.
| Orders a day | Wage per order | Fuel and other | Failed-delivery allowance | Cost per order |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6 | ₹141 | ₹15 | ₹8 | about ₹164 |
| 13 | ₹65 | ₹15 | ₹4 | about ₹84 |
| 20 | ₹42 | ₹15 | ₹3 | about ₹60 |
The wage line is the monthly wage divided by working days divided by orders. At six orders a day the rider costs ₹164 a trip. At twenty he costs ₹60. Same rider, same bike, same city. The only thing that changed is how many bags he carried.
Fuel is the smallest line on the sheet. The expensive thing is a rider standing still.
Where the waste hides
Look back at the 23 minutes. Only 8 of them are riding. The other 15 are waiting, handing over and returning. Cut the counter wait from 6 minutes to 2, because the bag was packed before the rider arrived, and the order takes 19 minutes. That alone is one more order an hour. The failed delivery is worse: it costs the full trip and then the trip again. One in twenty does not sound like much until you see it is ₹8 on every order, more than fuel and maintenance together at twenty a day.
This is why the operational gaps I listed in Why chemists lose customers to quick commerce are not just customer problems. No confirmation step means more cancellations at the door. No order queue means the rider waits while the pharmacist finishes a walk-in. Every gap in the shop is a line on the rider's sheet.
Density beats distance
The instinct is to think delivery cost is about how far the customer lives. It is not. Two kilometres or three makes a difference of a rupee or two of petrol and a few minutes. Six orders a day or twenty makes a difference of a hundred rupees an order. What matters is how many customers within a short ride want medicine in the same hours.
The neighbourhood pharmacy already has that. Its customers live within a couple of kilometres; that is why they are its customers. What it lacks is enough orders in a day to keep one rider moving, and that is exactly what pooling across shops gives. The restaurant on the corner never ran its own fleet. It shared one. The chemist can do the same, as I argued in Online without an app.
What this means for the shop and the platform
For the shop: your delivery boy is not free. If he does five trips a day on a ₹15,000 salary, each trip costs you more than ₹115 before fuel, and the time he spends away from the counter costs you walk-in sales too. The honest comparison is not "free versus a delivery fee". It is ₹115 a trip versus whatever the shared rider costs.
For MedMate: the whole model lives or dies on orders per rider-hour in a small area. Not on marketing, not on discounts. On enough pharmacies and enough customers within two kilometres of each other that a rider finishes one bag and the next is already packed. That is why we build one neighbourhood at a time, and why the numbers above are the ones I look at before any other.
The figures here are assumptions, chosen to be in a sensible range for Bengaluru in 2026. Replace them with your own. The shape of the answer will not change: the cost of delivering medicine in minutes is the cost of a rider standing still.