DoorDash now has the feature, Earn by Time Mode, to get paid hourly rather than per delivery.
I’ve now tried it a few times, and I’m certain that each time, I make less than minimum wage before expenses.
Here are the reasons why I will never drive hourly for DoorDash again.
The Hourly Rate Is Very Low
The hourly rate is very low in my area, typically $11 to $13 per active hour. According to DoorDash, an active hour is the time you’re engaged in completing an offer.
Your time isn’t counted while waiting for requests. Your time “on the clock” starts when you accept an offer and ends when the order is completed, either by drop-off or cancellation.
Recently, during a literal hurricane and tornado watch, with tons of water pouring down, the hourly rate went as high as $19 an hour. Of which I did not drive, as I value my life.
Normally, I work by multi-apping and getting paid per request. If I make less than $20 an hour, I consider it to be a bad night. My current average for 2024 is $25.20 per hour.
All that being said, the $11 to $13 that they offer for active hours is nowhere near what I typically make or need to make in order for this to be a profitable business.
Now, if hours were logged while the app was on, that might be a different thing altogether – as I would be able to have the app on, make money, and get requests from other apps at the same time.
But that wouldn’t be profitable for DoorDash, and I don’t see it ever happening.
It Makes Multi-Apping Difficult
When you are doing DoorDash hourly, you have to accept every order. If you decline more than two in a row, they turn you off of the Earn by Time Mode and put you back on the normal Per-Request side of things.
I even had one time when instead of switching me from hourly to requests, they stopped my scheduled dash, and I couldn’t dash again until it got busy.
If I have to accept requests that come in on one app, it makes it very difficult to multi-app.
When multi-apping you can’t just accept more than one order from two different apps. You have to assess if the request makes sense. If one app has a request that’s going north, and then a request comes in from the second app going south, then you wouldn’t accept that.
If however, you have two orders going the same way, then it makes sense to take the second request in the second app.
Using DoorDash hourly, it isn’t an option to decline a request coming in. True, you can pause requests, and I often do, but even with that, it doesn’t work as smoothly as when you are doing the per request driving.
Increase Wear and Tear on the Car
Some drivers like to do DoorDash hourly and love it when it’s a long drive.
Driving longer means more of the hour is active, which means you get more of the hourly rate.
In some markets, I’ve heard the hourly rate is $20+ an hour, so that somewhat makes sense.
However, if you’re driving a long distance and have no idea how much the tip will be or where the next potential request will be, you’re just adding to the wear and tear on your car.
Even if you’re not getting long-distance deliveries, you’re still making less money in the time you are driving. So even if you don’t put more wear and tear on your car, you, at a minimum, put the same amount of wear and tear on the car and get less money in return for it.
Tips? What Tips?
Drivers survive off tips.
Whether you agree that DoorDash, Uber Eats, GrubHub, etc. should pay more to the drivers or not, right now, we need tips to survive.
With the DoorDash hourly, I get almost no tips.
At least DoorDash is upfront about it, though. When you sign up, they tell you that the orders you get will be ones with low tips, which makes sense for them. Drivers aren’t accepting these orders otherwise, so sending them to hourly drivers instead gets them accepted.
You also don’t know what the tip will be ahead of time.
When you get an hourly request, it simply comes in with an estimate of how much time it’s going to take. Once you drop it off, it tells you if you got a tip. The best I got with hourly was $1; most of them had no additional tip.
It’s true that tips are not like they once were, and you have to decline a lot of horrible orders to get some good ones. But with DoorDash hourly, I never got a single good tip—I never even got one I would consider to be a fair tip.
Check Your Market
I have heard from drivers that they make significantly more doing DoorDash hourly rather than per request.
Each market is different.
So, even though I make less than minimum wage in my area if I do DoorDash hourly, that doesn’t mean you will.
Try it out for a day, and if it’s horrible, be like me and never do it again. If it’s great, feel free to let me know how amazing it is for you.
