The on-demand app market is rapidly growing. Driven by convenience and speed, these apps are connecting users instantly with services like rides, food, or tasks via smartphones. Even though the on-demand market is mature and highly competitive, especially in areas like general food delivery and ride sharing, there is still significant space for new entrants who want to focus on niche markets and have unique value propositions. If you are also planning to build an app for a quick delivery service or start your quick delivery business, this blog post covers everything you need to know about delivery in minutes app development. So, let’s dive in!
An instant delivery app is a specialized on-demand platform that connects users to nearby inventory, delivery partners, and fulfillment operations in real time, and hence allows them to quickly receive the services within minutes.
Over the recent years, instant delivery apps have become an ingrained habit for many consumers. They need these services frequently in their day-to-day lives. The global quick commerce market was valued at approximately USD 48.3 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach over USD 306 billion in 2033, growing at a CAGR of 20.18%. This conveys how on-demand services are no longer considered luxuries but ‘lifelines’ of modern urban living as they are deeply integrated into our daily routines.
What appears as a flawless and intuitive experience to the customer, placing an order in a few taps and receiving products within minutes, can take months of detailed planning, real-time engineering, and operational design behind the scenes. Every second counts in quick commerce, and delays or inventory mismatches can ruin the promise of ‘instant delivery.’
A quick delivery app must have a clear flow that ensures orders move from the customer to delivery in the fastest and most reliable way possible. This flow is the backbone of your platform. Here is how you can design it perfectly.
To make ordering fast and frictionless, here are the key things your app will need:
To ensure there is no overselling even under peak demand, we will focus on the following key aspects:
To get the right rider to the right order in the fastest possible time, here are the key things we will include in your product:
To orchestrate an end-to-end system so orders, inventory, and riders flow smoothly, we will employ the following:
To capture the insights, improve experience, and maintain loyalty, we will help you build the following tools and features:

Not all kinds of instant delivery apps are similar. Because in quick commerce, the success is defined less by what you deliver and more by how your delivery system is structured. Two companies that deliver groceries in 10 minutes can have completely different cost structures, tech stacks, and scaling paths. It is just the core idea of "delivery in minutes" that remains the same, but from a development perspective, each app has its unique operational constraints, inventory logic, and technology requirements. Below are the most common quick delivery business models, along with what founders need to build for each.
In this model, you own or control inventory and fulfil orders from micro-warehouses. To run an instant delivery business in this way, you will need:
It is a suitable model if you are planning to target high-density cities and your key focus lies on repeat orders and predictable demand.
In this type of business model, you don’t own inventory but aggregate nearby merchants. Here is what you will need to get a marketplace-assisted model designed:
This type is a mix of dark stores and third-party merchants. We can help you develop this kind of model as we specialize in developing the following:
Here, the revenue is driven by memberships, not per-order fees. This type of model requires:
It is suitable for dense delivery zones where user frequency is generally high.
We can also help you build an app for quick-delivery services, particularly for delivering urgent supplies to businesses such as clinics, retailers, and cafes.
To build this kind of business model, you will need:
Eventually, when you start your own quick delivery business, and have to pick the right business model, it all comes down to your choice regarding:
The instant delivery market is expanding rapidly, but not every niche offers the same opportunities. Some areas are crowded and highly competitive, while others are emerging and hold significant potential for new entrants. Here are some of the popular and emerging niches in instant delivery app development that are showing high demand. Let’s take a look at them:
Food delivery is undoubtedly the most recognizable and widely used segment in the instant delivery market. Urban consumers across the globe expect their meals delivered fast, often within 15-20 minutes. This makes it a natural starting point for entrepreneurs looking to enter the quick commerce space.
The market saturation in the food delivery industry is extremely high. However, despite this, demand continues to grow because food is a recurring need, and convenience drives repeat usage.
Novel ideas in this space, if you want to start your own quick delivery business:
While general food delivery is competitive, micro-niches like the following still have opportunities:
Overall, food delivery is a high-volume and high-frequency niche, which means operational efficiency can make or break your app. Even a small improvement in delivery speed or inventory management can provide a competitive edge.
This niche is growing rapidly but moderately saturated in top metros. Unlike food, which people order multiple times a day, groceries and essentials are recurring needs that touch almost every household, making it a high-demand niche with strong retention potential.
Novel ideas in this space, if you want to start your own same day delivery grocery business app:
While brands like Getir, Careem, DashMart, and Blinkit have built strong footholds in major cities, the market remains largely unpenetrated. Many urban areas, tier 2 cities, and even smaller neighbourhoods in countries such as the US, the UAE, and Australia remain underserved.
New entrants can explore product segments such as eco-friendly groceries, organic produce, and imported items to make their mark in this space.
Pharmacy and health product delivery is becoming an important part of instant delivery recently, especially in urban areas. While players like PharmEasy (India), Capsule (US), Boots Instant Delivery (UK) are dominating, there is still room for new players, especially in cities and regions where instant pharmacy delivery has not yet become mainstream.
Novel concepts new entrants can introduce:
Electronics and gadget delivery is still relatively new in the instant-delivery space. Very few players offer instant delivery for electronics, creating a clear opportunity for new entrants.
Novel concepts new entrants can introduce:
Lifestyle and luxury delivery is one of the most novel niches in instant delivery app development. Very few players focus on ultra-fast same delivery of luxury items like perfumes, accessories, and cosmetics, especially in cities like Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
Why this niche can succeed:

In quick commerce, platform or app development is largely focused on having essential features. Each feature exists to solve a specific operational bottleneck. Missing or underbuilding any of these can directly impact your delivery time, order success rate, or unit economics.
To successfully design the features in your app, you should first map out the system responsibilities. Here is how:
It is a must-have feature during instant delivery app development because, without it, the customer might place an order for an item that is actually out of stock. This can lead to failed deliveries, refunds, loss of trust, and substitutions.
It’s not enough to show stock. You need to reserve items the instant a customer confirms an order. When reservation logic is not in place, two customers might place an order for the same item at the same time. This can cause operational chaos.
Instant app delivery is all about providing immediate access to goods or services to customers. This is all possible when event-driven state management ensures that every change, like picked, packed, or out for delivery, is propagated instantly to all stakeholders. Without it, riders wait unnecessarily, stores miscommunicate, and customers lose trust.
It is a very important tool to ensure that available riders are used effectively and the system can balance the workload across the fleet. It also plays a crucial role in minimizing downtime between deliveries and ensuring faster service, which is a key driver of customer satisfaction.
Without an intelligent system, delivery operations revert to manual assignment or a simple, inefficient mode.
It is a core feature that connects riders, customers, and operations. Live location updates let the app adjust ETAs, reroute riders if needed, and keep customers informed. Without it, your app feels opaque, and your delivery reliability suffers.
Picking and substitution workflows within the store are a critical feature as they ensure that items are packed correctly, substitutions are handled according to customer preferences, and delays are minimized. Ignoring it can lead to operational bottlenecks.
Ops dashboards and manual override tools are core features for managing exceptions. When the unexpected changes happen, like store stock mismatch, sudden traffic, etc, operations must be able to intervene right away. Otherwise, small issues can snowball into big failures.
This feature handles all the inevitable mistakes that happen in instant delivery. When a rider is delayed due to traffic or route issues, or a substitution does not match the customer’s preference, the system automatically detects the issue and triggers the appropriate corrective action, such as issuing a refund.
Your technology architecture is the foundation that makes real-time inventory updates, intelligent rider assignment, and other features work flawlessly. Without a solid architecture, the features we discussed cannot function properly and may fail under pressure from scale, peak hours, or citywide expansion.
In this section, we will discuss the key architectural choices and explain how they keep your app fast and ready to grow.
In ultra-fast delivery, customers expect their orders in minutes. That means speed matters more than handling huge volumes at once. Traditional e-commerce systems work well when you can process orders in batches, but with quick commerce, apps cannot wait, as they need everything to happen immediately. So, design your system so that each order is processed as soon as it comes in, instead of waiting for a batch of orders.
For this, you will need to focus on the following key things:
During instant delivery app development, one of the first architectural questions founders face is whether to start with a monolithic system or microservices. This choice affects everything from data consistency to how quickly your features, like real-time inventory and rider assignment, can work together.
Monoliths are generally ideal for early-stage apps or single-city launches. Because here all components, such as the customer app, ride app, store interface, and inventory, live in a single system. This setup can simplify state management, debugging, and deployment, making it easier to ensure that features like real-time inventory and order tracking work reliably.
However, many startups find adopting microservices too early tempting. It is worth noting that while they offer modularity and independent scaling, starting with them can introduce network delays, distributed state issues, and coordination overhead. In a quick-commerce app, even a 100-200 ms delay across services can cascade into failed deliveries and frustrated customers.
So, it is always better to begin with a monolith but design with future microservices boundaries in mind, so scaling to multiple cities or stores later can be carried out easily.
Once the core architecture is decided, the next question becomes how the system reacts to change. In instant delivery, orders move, inventory shifts, and stores update availability all within minutes. A traditional request-response model simply cannot keep up with this pace.
This is where an event-driven system becomes crucial. Instead of waiting for a component to ask for updates, the system broadcasts events like “order placed,” “item reserved” to all relevant parts of the system immediately.
Not everything in your system needs real-time updates, so overusing this technology can increase the cost and complexity of your project. Also, underusing it in the wrong places can start affecting your delivery efficiency.
So, identify your mission-critical areas such as:
Inventory errors are one of the biggest killers for quick-commerce apps. To prevent this, you need to:
Machine learning engines and complex routing can sound impressive, but they are difficult to debug and prone to unpredictable failures. That’s why you should start off with the simple rule-based dispatch, where you assign riders based on location, availability, and SLA, and only introduce optimization engines once you have enough data and operational stability.
You should plan the scaling based on one city’s traffic and demand spike rather than the system size; otherwise, it can break the whole system. It allows you to manage the specific operational complexities, logistical challenges, and local market nuances inherent to each new region.
There are various factors in instant delivery app development that determine the overall cost to build a one-minute delivery app. Understanding these helps entrepreneurs plan the app development wisely and avoid surprises later on. Here are some major influential factors that make up the cost:
The biggest cost driver in instant delivery apps is the required level of system real-time. A basic implementation may only update the order status. But a more advanced build will require real-time inventory locking, live ETA recalculation, instant failure handling, and substitutions. Every real-time dependency increases backend complexity along with the infrastructure planning and testing effort.
Instant delivery development app cost can suddenly increase with the number of independent apps required. A minimal setup may include only a customer app and a basic admin panel; on the other hand, a production-grade instant delivery platform usually require:
Each app will add the frontend development, API coordination, QA cycles, and long-term maintenance overhead.
Building for a single city with fixed delivery zones is far simpler than handling dynamic location logic. Development effort increases when the app needs:
If you want to get an app developed for a limited order volume, the development costs will stay lower. But if you want it to handle peak hour spikes, high concurrency, and flash demand from day one, the costs can go up.
Every external integration will add development time and risk. A low-cost build may include only:
While a more advanced build often includes:
You can have a basic admin panel for viewing orders and users. But you will need advanced internal tools to enable manual order intervention, rider reassignment, exception resolution, and more.
Some businesses plan for minimal iteration after release. Other budget for continuous optimization, feature evolution, and performance tuning based on real usage. Instant delivery apps usually fall into the second category.
There are three ways you can build an instant delivery app. Let’s figure out how much it costs in each approach:
A. MVP for a single city
It is an ideal option for businesses and founders who want to validate demand in one controlled market. This kind of build will basically cover the following:
B. Multi-city expansion-ready build
This approach is chosen by founders who already understand the market and want to avoid rebuilding after early traction.
It comes with:
C. Enterprise-grade quick-commerce platform
This is a long-term infrastructure investment that comes with:
Most quick-delivery startups don’t fail because demand isn't there; they fail because they make mistakes in their decision-making. And when they launch their app in the real world, it fails to take on the challenges and pressure. Here are the most common mistakes they make that you need to avoid:
Many founders build instant delivery apps using assumptions borrowed from food delivery or e-commerce. Now, this only works until the order volume is low. Once the threshold is reached (which they usually set very low), the system collapses.
That’s why it’s very important to make sure of the following things while getting an instant delivery app designed:
Most failures in quick delivery platforms are inventory failures disguised as delivery problems. To reduce initial build costs or accelerate launch, many businesses choose to keep inventory simple. That decision is reflected in development through stock syncs, no reservation logic, and limited handling of edge cases. As the demand grows, this decision causes issues like the following:
This mistake arises when founders treat infrastructure and engineering choices as a budget exercise first, instead of a service-level promise.
From a development perspective, these decisions can limit how fast the system can process orders, update inventory, or reassign riders during peak demand. And eventually, it all results in:
If you are looking for a reliable agency with extensive experience in building quick commerce and instant delivery apps, this list provides some of the top contenders in the space. These companies have helped various startups and established businesses develop quick delivery apps:
Suffescom Solutions is one of the most experienced and trusted mobile app development agencies. They help high-growth businesses develop quick delivery apps. They have over a decade of experience in building scalable digital products. Since its founding in 2013, they have grown into a global development firm with offices and clients across the US, UK, UAE, India, Singapore, and Australia.
Over the years, they have consistently delivered thousands of mobile and web application solutions across industries, making it a strong contender for entrepreneurs who want to develop quick delivery apps. Their portfolio features apps similar to Blinkit, Zepto, Careem Quik, Noon Minutes, DashMart, and Getir.
They offer a full range of services, from MVP launches to custom builds designed to scale and enterprise needs. Their capabilities include:
They have received multiple industry accolades, like Best Design Award from DesignRush, recognition from Hindustan Times as an emerging tech innovator, and multiple top rankings on independent review platforms.
Clients consistently praise the company for its affordable and launch-ready solutions that perfectly balance cost with scalability. Their high ratings across leading and most trust review platforms like Clutch, GoodFirms, and Techreviewer showcase a strong customer satisfaction rate.
Hyperlocal Cloud Inc. is a well-established on-demand app development agency that specializes in building feature-rich solutions for hyperlocal businesses and digital marketplaces. They serve clients across the world. Their main focus lies on providing custom and white‑label development for hyperlocal delivery, marketplace apps, and on‑demand platforms. Over the years, they have delivered around 150 clone apps and served more than 200 clients.
Their full spectrum of app and software development services includes:
RisingMax is a well-established mobile app and custom software development company with over 13 years of industry experience. They have completed over 1,000+ projects and delivered value to 500+ clients across 30+ countries.
They offer end-to-end technology services that go beyond basic coding. Their range of services includes the following:
They have been featured and recognized by notable industry outlets various times, including the title of Top Rising AI Development Partners in the USA by The New York Times, Top Enterprise Software Development Agency by Forbes, and more.
AI Development Services is a technology agency specializing in end-to-end AI and software development solutions that help businesses develop quick delivery apps and intelligent & scalable solutions. They bring advanced AI and machine learning expertise to digital products, making them a strong choice for businesses looking to build quick-commerce platforms with smarter operations and personalization.
Key Services They Offer:
Mindinventory is a well-established software development agency with over 15 years of experience. They help startups and growing businesses build user-centric applications across industries, including on-demand platforms and quick commerce apps. They claim to have delivered over 2,500 projects. Their broad development experience makes them a solid choice for founders building instant delivery platforms.
Key Services They Offer:
The rapid growth of the on-demand economy has made quick delivery apps an essential part of modern urban life. While the market is highly competitive, there are still significant opportunities for new entrants who focus on niche segments, underserved geographies, and unique value propositions. But the success in this space is not about simply copying the existing platforms but building a system that can reliably operate under extreme time constraints and operational pressure. That’s why businesses must carefully consider the business model and operational approach before starting the development. In short, building a successful quick delivery app is a delicate balance of market insights, operational excellence, and, most importantly, technical prowess.
Fret Not! We have Something to Offer.