Own rider or courier partner: the real cost per parcel
Running your own rider replaces one charge with six, and four of them are invisible until you look. Here is the arithmetic, the error almost everyone makes in it, and the three cases where in-house genuinely wins.
Sellers who run their own rider usually do it because the courier charge looks like the biggest line on the invoice. It is the most visible cost, not the largest one. Running delivery yourself replaces one charge with six, and four of the six do not appear anywhere until you look for them.
This works out the real cost per parcel on both sides, names the volume where in-house starts to win, and says where it never does.
What a courier parcel costs, precisely
Inside Lahore City, standard, a 1 kg parcel is PKR 220. A 2 kg parcel is PKR 300. The extended area adds a flat PKR 50. Nothing is added at invoice, because the published rates include sales tax and the fuel adjustment. An undelivered parcel and a returned parcel are not charged at all.
So for a seller shipping 1 kg parcels inside the city, the courier cost per delivered parcel is PKR 220, and the cost per attempted-but-failed parcel is zero. Courier charges in Lahore carries the full table and the pricing calculator prices your actual parcel.
What an in-house rider costs
Six lines, and you need all six to make the comparison honest.
- 01Salary. A monthly figure you pay whether you ship forty parcels that day or four
- 02Fuel. Variable with distance, and Lahore distances are not short once you are past the obvious areas
- 03The bike. Purchase or lease, plus depreciation, plus the day it is off the road
- 04Maintenance and tyres. Predictable in aggregate, annoying in timing
- 05Your own time. Route planning, cash reconciliation at the end of the day, and the phone calls when a customer is not in
- 06The risk you now carry. An accident, a theft, a rider who leaves at Eid, a day with no cover
Lines one to four are arithmetic and you can get them from your own records. Line five is the one sellers omit and it is often the largest. Line six is not a cost until the year it is the only cost that matters.
The arithmetic that decides it
In-house is a fixed cost divided by volume. A courier is a variable cost per parcel. So the comparison is a single division:
in-house cost per parcel = (salary + fuel + bike + maintenance + your time) ÷ parcels actually delivered
Two things follow immediately, and they are the whole decision.
The denominator is deliveries, not attempts
Your rider gets paid for the day whether the customer was in or not. The courier charges nothing for the attempt that failed. If one in five of your attempts fails, your in-house cost per *delivered* parcel is 25 percent higher than your cost per attempt, while the courier figure does not move at all.
This is the single most common error in the calculation. Why COD parcels come back covers how high that share typically runs and what moves it.
Low-volume days set the price, not average days
A rider doing forty deliveries on Monday and nine on Tuesday has a wildly different cost per parcel on the two days. The month's figure is dominated by the quiet days, and sellers model the busy ones.
Where in-house genuinely wins
Three cases, and they are real.
- High, consistent daily volume in a tight geography. A rider doing thirty-five deliveries inside one or two sectors every day is efficient in a way no network can match
- Items that need handling a courier will not do. Assembly, installation, a demonstration at the door, a size exchange on the spot
- Same-hour delivery as a product promise. If your offer is two hours, you need your own rider, because no courier sells that
Notice what all three have in common: they are about the service being different, not about the cost being lower. In-house that is justified on cost alone is usually a calculation done on a good week.
Where in-house never wins
- Spread-out geography. One rider crossing Lahore for six deliveries is a day gone
- Variable volume. The fixed cost does not shrink on a slow day
- The extended area. A flat PKR 50 surcharge is dramatically cheaper than sending your own rider beyond Bahria Orchard and back
- Anything you cannot cover when the rider is ill
The hybrid, which is what most sellers settle on
Own rider for the dense sector nearest you where volume is reliable, courier for everything else. It keeps the fixed cost small enough that a quiet day does not hurt, and it sends the long trips to someone whose cost per parcel does not depend on your volume that day.
If you go hybrid, keep the two cost lines separate in your books from the start. A combined delivery cost figure tells you nothing about which half to change.
The question underneath all of it
Not "which is cheaper per parcel", but "which risk do I want to own". In-house means you own rider availability, cash handling, vehicle uptime and route efficiency. A courier means you own the relationship and the reconciliation, and you can check both. Eleven questions to ask a courier is how you make the second one checkable.
Our service options set out what we run, and the merchant signup form starts a conversation if the arithmetic points that way.
Booking in Lahore starts at PKR 180 for the first 0.5 kg. Work out your own figure before you commit.