How much money can you make from running free meal delivery services?
Looking at data shared by others, top performers are basically doing over 10 million RMB in monthly revenue (with orders averaging over 200,000 per day). The essence of the food delivery "霸王餐" (free meal) model is essentially users fake-ordering from food delivery restaurants—basically you place a normal order first, and after completion, the restaurant refunds your刷单 cost through a third-party store's budget as rebates to users. The platform takes a cut, users get the biggest share with cheap meals, and restaurants earn positive reviews to boost platform traffic. Logically there's nothing wrong with it, and it can indeed work. But the problem is that it fundamentally constitutes刷单 (fake ordering), which isn't very compliant. Additionally, restaurants are unlikely to run such promotions indefinitely. The cost of acquiring merchants is high, and the overall risk is still on the higher side. However, for ordinary people just looking to eat cheaper food delivery, it's workable. If you have an offline team (like Taobao affiliate groups), you might not be able to reuse traffic for monetization.
Food Delivery Free Meals