Zepto sold 1 million memberships in a week, then quietly gave the model away

India's quick-commerce war in 2024 was a three-way contest — Blinkit at 46–48% share by 2025, Swiggy Instamart near 24%, Zepto near 22% — in a $6–7 billion GMV category growing at roughly 40% a year. Zepto, founded in 2021 as KiranaKart, was the loss-making challenger: revenue up fourteen-fold to ₹2,024 crore in FY23, losses up three-fold to ₹1,272 crore. In February 2024 it launched Zepto Pass, a paid membership — ₹19 introductory, later ₹299 a month — with free delivery above ₹99, up to 20% discounts, and coverage extending to the Zepto Cafe vertical.

The milestone came fast: co-founder Aadit Palicha announced one million sign-ups within a week of launch. The design followed standard membership economics — a sunk-cost frame that shifts customers from per-order cost evaluation to utilisation, lifting frequency — with the fee deliberately lowered for early adoption and benefits spanning both planned grocery restocking and impulse Cafe orders to widen daily use.

Then came the honest twist. In April 2025, after roughly fourteen months, Zepto quietly replaced Pass with 'Zepto Daily' — materially similar benefits, rolled out invite-only in select pin codes at entry prices as low as ₹1, with no public explanation. The pivot marked membership's real role in a knife-fight category: not a revenue line but a habit lock-in, repriced to near zero the moment the fee mattered more to customers than to the platform.

Membership is a habit machine, not a fee

The sunk-cost frame shifts customers from evaluating each order to maximising membership — frequency and basket size follow.

Two-tier pricing reduced the adoption barrier first and established the commercial price second.

Extending benefits to Zepto Cafe widened the use-occasions, making the membership a daily-life convenience rather than a grocery perk.

An IPO-bound challenger needed retention metrics more than membership revenue — so the fee became negotiable, the habit didn't.

A membership is a habit machine, not a revenue line. When rivals copy it, the fee stops differentiating — so price the habit, not the membership.

Amid Blinkit's widening lead, Zepto replaced Pass with the near-free Zepto Daily in April 2025 without public comment on the reasons. The company's momentum continued regardless — more than two million orders a day during Diwali week 2025 and a $450 million round at a $7 billion valuation that October, led by CalPERS, as the IPO preparation that shaped the membership's design pressed on.