Zomato and Swiggy's platform fee has grown 800% in three years. It is not stopping.

Three years ago, the platform fee on your Zomato or Swiggy order was ₹2 and the companies described it as a test. It is now ₹17.58, inclusive of GST, charged on every order to every user, including the ones who pay for Gold and One. In three years, the fee has risen roughly 800 percent. Nothing stopped it, and nothing on the current trajectory is going to.

The timeline is on the record. Zomato introduced the fee at ₹2 in August 2023 and framed it as temporary. It moved to ₹4 by January 2024, ₹6 in mid-2024, ₹10 as a “festive season fee” that October, ₹12.50 through 2025, ₹14.90 pre-GST in March 2026, and Swiggy matched it inside the week at ₹17.58 inclusive of GST, a 17 percent jump. The last hike alone adds over ₹100 crore to combined revenue per quarter across the two companies, by one analyst’s estimate. That is what a line item invented in 2023 is now worth.

Stack it on a real order. A ₹300 burger, delivered to Koramangala: ₹300 for the food, ₹35 delivery, ₹17.58 platform fee, ₹25 packaging, 5 percent GST on the order, and whatever the surge or rain fee is at that moment. The bill arrives closer to ₹420. The platform fee by itself is now 5 to 6 percent of average order value in Indian cities, and it is uncollectible by any mechanism the customer has. Gold and One subscribers still pay it; the delivery discounts those subscriptions offer run under the platform fee, not alongside it. In September 2025 both apps added a ₹25 “rain fee”, chargeable on wet-weather orders on top of everything else. Weather is a line item now.

The restaurant side has gone the same way. Both platforms take between 8 and 28 percent commission on every order, plus advertising spend to appear in search, plus payment processing. In July 2026 more than 1,000 Bengaluru restaurant owners threatened to delist from both platforms over the structure, and some followed through on August 15. That was by far the largest coordinated restaurant action against the duopoly to date. The platforms responded with a round of listening sessions and no change to the fee stack.

Three structural facts explain why none of this reverses. First, both companies are now public: Swiggy listed in November 2024 at a ₹1.1 lakh crore valuation, and Eternal has been listed since 2021. Each quarter is a scorecard, and discretionary subsidy burn is what analysts punish. Second, the duopoly is near-complete at national scale: outside Bengaluru, Rapido’s zero-platform-fee Ownly product is not yet live, and Magicpin’s smaller ₹10 fee has not achieved the catalogue depth to be a real alternative. Third, there is no regulatory counterweight. CCPA has shown no appetite to intervene on platform pricing, and no NPCI-equivalent authority sits over food delivery.

What actually works for the customer is unglamorous. For orders under ₹300, calling the restaurant directly beats the apps on total cost by ₹20 or more almost every time; most places still dispatch through their own staff or a Dunzo pickup. For discovery, the apps remain unmatched, with their menus, photos, filters and ratings. The purchase itself has quietly stopped being the thing they are cheapest at. In Bengaluru, Rapido Ownly is worth setting up as a parallel option on the home screen.

Nothing about this is testing any more. The platform fee is a profit line, not an experiment. It has not stopped at ₹17.58 and there is no credible reason it will.