What: JoyRun is a food and grocery delivery service that encourages runners to make regular group deliveries

Expected pay: $0 to $5 per order

Husl$core: $$$

Commissions & fees: 0-18%

Where: Nationwide

Requirements: Smart phone

Review: 

JoyRun’s business is a bit free-form, so it’s probably best explained with an example. Have you ever had one of those days when everybody in your office was too busy working to go out to lunch? Someone probably volunteered to pick up sandwiches and took orders, right? If you give that volunteer the ability to charge a few bucks for each order, you’ve got the concept of JoyRun. 

Founder Manish Rathi says JoyRun is all about friends, neighbors and co-workers helping each other out. Runners help by getting the food/running the errands. Customers help by paying the runners a small fee — up to $5 per order — and, perhaps, a tip.

However, the only way for runners to earn a decent amount of money with this app is if they’re able to bundle multiple orders, picking up and dropping off in a tight geographic range. That’s because you can’t charge more than $5 per order. Thus, you’d need at least four orders to earn more than minimum wage, after expenses, given the time it’s likely to take to pickup and drop-off everything.

You may get that sort of order volume where JoyRun is best established on college campuses and military bases. But it’s not likely to happen anytime soon in your average neighborhood.

You front the cash

Moreover, unless you are ordering from one of a handful of participating merchants, the runner also has to front the cash for customers. You get repaid within hours via direct deposit, says Rathi. However, if you get paid by debit card, it could take a week. You’ll need your own credit card, with plenty of available credit, to make this work.

That said, if you work in a big office and can get all of your co-workers sign up for the service, it could be lucrative.  After all, you don’t have to charge a big fee to earn good money when you’re making one run to one restaurant and delivering 10 orders in the same building.

How JoyRun works

You decide what store or restaurant you’re going to run to; when; how much to charge (within the 0-$5 range); and tell everyone when their orders are likely to be delivered. The amount you earn hinges on how many people sign up to have you pick up their orders.

Rathi says the company’s runners make an average of $30 per hour when they’re working in participating military communities in San Antonio. On college campuses, he estimates that students earn about $20 per hour.

Site fees

JoyRun charges a fee that’s paid by runners. But the fee is graduated so it doesn’t eat up too much of your profit. Specifically, the app charges nothing for runs that pay you less than $3. It charges 15 cents when you earn $4 and 30 cents when you earn $5. The fee jumps by another 15 cents for each additional dollar earned.

Recommendations:

Other sites where you can delivery groceries and meals include GrubHub, DoorDash, Instacart and Shipt. 

From AppGrooves: 
“It is SO not worth it to be a runner. 

“This app is a great concept but has a lot of room for improvement. If you front $10 for an order and only make $13, you see a very tiny profit about a week later. That isn’t great when you don’t have a lot of money to front in the first place.”

“Great for making extra money as a student. I like the idea of getting rewarded for getting other people their orders. I also like how payment goes directly through the app instead of the continuous Venmo-ing and trying to figure out how to split the payment.”