In September 2025, Swiggy quietly launched a second food delivery app in Pune. Green and pink instead of orange. No platform fee. No packaging fee. Menu prices matched to what the restaurant charges at the counter. Ten months later it was live in 40 cities. Swiggy had built a competitor to itself, and its biggest rival said publicly that it did not understand why.
We set out to answer three questions. Why would a company at war with Zomato open a second front against its own app? Is Toing actually cheaper, or is that marketing? And can an app that charges its users almost nothing ever make money? The centrepiece is our own field research: identical carts on rival apps, minutes apart, in Bengaluru and in Delhi.
The three minute version
- What happened
- Swiggy launched Toing in September 2025: no platform fee, no packaging fee, menu prices matched to the counter. It reached 40 cities in ten months.
- What we found
- Rapido’s Ownly beat every app on price. Zomato and Swiggy beat Toing too, but only once a membership or a live deal was stacked on top.
- Why Swiggy did it
- Five reasons at once: the priced out student, Rapido moving first, the ONDC threat, a clean dataset and the long Jio style game.
- Our call
- Jio, not Foodpanda, with one condition: Toing has to turn its head start into habit before Ownly reaches Delhi.
The ₹590 dinner
A user on r/Zomato ordered two shawarmas. The app quoted ₹590. The restaurant’s own menu said the food cost ₹330. So he booked a Porter bike courier for ₹90, had the rider order at the counter and paid the restaurant directly over UPI. Total: ₹420, a 29 percent saving on the exact same dinner.
A person manually coordinated two apps, a phone call and a payment, and still beat a company whose entire pitch is convenience. The gap is not one big fee. It is a stack of small ones: a platform fee that went from ₹2 in April 2023 to ₹17.58 in March 2026, packaging charges of roughly ₹20 to 30, delivery fees, rain surcharges and menu prices quietly inflated online to recover the commission restaurants pay. Flat fees are regressive. Roughly ₹45 of fixed charges is noise on a ₹600 family order and a wall on a ₹150 student meal.
Try it: what the fee stack adds to your order
+52% on top of the food on a typical incumbent app. On Toing, packaging and platform fees are zero and only delivery applies.
Illustrative, using the report’s typical charges: packaging ₹25, platform ₹17.58, delivery ₹35, before GST and surge fees.
What Swiggy actually did: a flanker brand
Hindustan Unilever sells Wheel to one India and Surf Excel to another. Toyota did not badge its luxury cars as Toyotas, it invented Lexus. Marketers call this a flanker brand: a second brand sent to fight in a price segment the parent cannot enter without wounding itself. Toing is Swiggy’s flanker. Different name, different colours, same backend. Swiggy’s food marketplace CEO Rohit Kapoor called it a clean experiment on a different business model.
Why not a budget tab inside the main app? Swiggy already has one, the 99 Store. The problem is identity, not features. For a student managing ₹200 orders, the mental file reads “Swiggy is for when I have money”, and a discount corner inside a premium app does not rewrite that file. A separate app also protects restaurant relationships, keeps the main app’s analytics clean and filters for price sensitive users on its own. A budget platform does not need to find those users. They find it.
Two cities. Six carts. Toing won neither test.
Marketing claims are cheap. Carts are not. On June 21, 2026 we built the same two item order at 1966 The Mumbai Cafe in Vasanth Nagar, Bengaluru, on Zomato, Swiggy, Toing and Rapido’s Ownly. Bengaluru was deliberate: it is the only city where Ownly operates, so it is the only place this four way test is possible.
| Item | Zomato | Swiggy | Toing | Ownly |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thalipeth, 3 pieces | ₹149 | ₹149 | ₹128 | ₹110 |
| Mumbai Cheela, 2 pieces | ₹139 | ₹139 | ₹120 | ₹99 |
| Item total | ₹288 | ₹288 | ₹248 | ₹209 |
The incumbents price identically, to the rupee. Toing sits 14 percent below them on the menu, which is exactly what its price parity pitch promises. Ownly sits 27 percent below. Then came the checkout.
| Charge | Zomato | Swiggy | Toing | Ownly |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Item total | ₹288.00 | ₹288.00 | ₹248.00 | ₹209.00 |
| Packaging | ₹10.90 | ₹14.40 | ₹0 | ₹0 |
| Platform fee | ₹14.90 | ₹17.58 | ₹0 | ₹0 |
| Delivery, 1.1 km | ₹0 with Gold | ₹46, or ₹0 with One | ₹25.00 | ₹0, waived |
| GST and taxes | ₹14.13 | ₹15.12 | ₹16.90 | ₹10.45 |
| Sticker total | ₹327.93 | ₹382 | ₹290.00 | ₹219.45 |
| Final price you pay | ₹227.93 | ₹336 | ₹290.00 | ₹219.45 |
Cheapest by every measure, 24 percent below Toing. Also the least explained: it charges restaurants nothing and Rapido says it is not earning money yet.
The fee elimination is real and the bill is the cleanest. But it charged ₹25 for 1.1 km while every rival waived delivery, and Ownly beat it on every line.
Most expensive sticker, then a coupon and Gold took it to ₹227.93, 21 percent under Toing. The fee stack is real and so is the discount arsenal.
The heaviest fee load and a ₹382 sticker. One rescues it to ₹336, and it still lost to its own budget sibling.
Delhi, on July 7, 2026, showed something more dangerous. Same burger combo at Burger Singh on three apps, during a live deal window where Zomato and Swiggy both listed it at ₹249 against an MRP of ₹498.
| Charge | Zomato | Swiggy | Toing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Item, after deals | ₹249 | ₹249 | ₹438, no deal |
| Packaging | ₹26.10 | ₹9.96 | ₹0 |
| Platform fee | ₹14.90 | ₹17.58 | ₹0 |
| Delivery | ₹0 with Gold | ₹0 with One | ₹25.00 for 2.8 km |
| GST and taxes | ₹16.44 | ₹12.95 | ₹26.40 |
| To pay | ₹286.43 | ₹290.00 | ₹489.00 |
Read carefully, this is not “Toing is expensive”. Its ₹438 was 12 percent under the incumbents’ ₹498 sticker. What flipped the result is the machinery Toing deliberately does not have: item deals, coupons, memberships and countdown discounts. Toing wins the customer who hates fee games. It loses the customer who plays them well.
So which app is cheapest for you?
Pick the shopper you are. The answer comes straight from our field tests.
Choose one above.
Five theories, all true at different depths
- The audience gap
A student earning ₹15,000 to 25,000 a month feels a ₹45 fee stack as a tax on eating. The main app’s economics are built for bigger, less frequent orders. Toing targets the customer that structure priced out, and the How India Eats 2025 data says that young customer is where the category’s growth is.
- The Rapido problem
Ownly’s zero commission pilot went live in Bengaluru in August 2025, backed by the National Restaurant Association of India. Toing launched in September. On September 23 Swiggy sold its entire Rapido stake. While Ownly spent seven months in pilot, Toing reached 40 cities. The head start is the strategy.
- The ONDC hedge
The government backed open network lets restaurants sell without aggregator commissions. It moves slowly, but it attacks the same nerve. If cheap, low commission delivery is coming anyway, Swiggy would rather own the app that delivers it.
- The data play
A separate app produces a separate dataset. Every Toing user has self selected as price sensitive, and experiments run with no risk to the flagship. A storefront outside, a laboratory inside.
- The Jio playbook
Subsidise, buy the habit, monetise later. Capture the ₹120 order student and collect when they graduate to ₹400 lunches on the main app. The caution: food is not telecom. Every order carries a real delivery cost.
How does Toing make money?
It does not, yet, and that appears to be the plan. Toing waives the user side of the bill. Nothing published says it waives the restaurant side, and its commission rate is not public anywhere, so any per order model is an estimate. The one hard anchor: a rider costs nearly the same to deploy for a ₹130 order as for a ₹500 one, which makes small baskets structurally loss making. Three bets can pay that back, and Swiggy does not have to pick one: order density around campuses and tech parks, customers graduating to the main app, and advertising once the traffic exists.
Ownly charges restaurants nothing and earns only a flat delivery fee, which is why the restaurant association backed it and not Toing. Toing subsidises the customer while, as far as anyone can tell, still charging the restaurant. Ownly subsidises both and has no visible revenue engine at all.
Our call: Jio, with one condition
Swiggy’s sibling apps Pyng and Snacc were shut within months, so survival is earned quarterly. But Toing runs on marketplace machinery Swiggy spent a decade building, inside the one segment Swiggy has made profitable, aimed at the customer every dataset calls the growth engine. Swiggy funded its first brand campaign in May 2026, the same year it was shutting other experiments for burning cash.
If Ownly’s zero commission model reaches Delhi NCR with the restaurant association behind it before Toing turns its head start into habit, Swiggy will have spent crores acquiring India’s most price sensitive customers for a rival with better restaurant economics.
Method and sources
Primary research: two field tests, Bengaluru on June 21, 2026 and Delhi on July 7, 2026, with every screen archived, plus first hand testing of Toing’s referral flow, delivery fees and its since removed lowest price guarantee. Verified secondary sources include Swiggy’s audited FY26 results, exchange filings on the Rapido stake sale, the How India Eats 2025 report by Swiggy and Kearney, Zomato shareholder letters, and reporting by MediaNama, Inc42, Storyboard18, Entrackr and BusinessToday. Two things are labelled estimates in the full report: Toing’s restaurant commission and the per order economics.
Research team
- Utkarsh Goyal, lead
- Ayendrila Mitra, lead
- Yuvraj Bohra
- Aditi Goyal
- Arnav Kalra
- Anant
- Shruti Jaiswal
- Naveen Kumar
- Ayan Gupta