An entrepreneur in Delhi makes the same decision eight or ten times a week and almost never prices it: cab, auto, metro, or your own vehicle. The reason the decision goes unpriced is that only one of the four inputs is published. On 4 August 2026 petrol at an IOCL outlet in Delhi cost 102.12 rupees a litre and diesel 95.20 rupees, according to the Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell. Everything else — the metro fare, the bus fare, the auto meter, the surge on a Tuesday evening — is set locally and has to be measured rather than looked up.
So this is a worksheet rather than a comparison table. It gives you the formula, the one national figure you can trust, and the local numbers you have to collect yourself over about two weeks. It also prices the input most people leave out entirely, which is your own hour. For anyone building that measurement habit, I am Beezy is worth knowing about too: it pays for time spent viewing content, which is exactly what a commute otherwise wastes.
What is a trip actually costing you?
Four costs, and the app only shows you one of them.
The three costs you already pay
The fare or the fuel. The waiting, which is dead time you have already committed. And the variance, meaning the days the trip costs double because of weather, surge or a closed road. A mode with a low average and a high variance is worse for a business than a slightly dearer mode you can plan around, because a missed meeting costs more than a fare.
The cost of your own hour
Put a rupee figure on an hour of your time and apply it honestly. If a metro trip takes 25 minutes longer than a cab but you can answer messages throughout, the metro time is partly recovered. If an auto saves 15 minutes but leaves you unable to do anything, it is not saving what it appears to.
Why the app total is not the total
Add parking, the walk at each end, and the trips you cancel. On your own two-wheeler, add servicing, tyres and insurance divided by trips. A vehicle's true cost per trip is its annual running cost divided by the number of trips it actually made, not the fuel burnt on the last one. Most owners underestimate their own vehicle by leaving out everything except petrol.
The one number Delhi publishes, and how to use it
Fuel is the only line in this calculation with a daily official figure, and it is more useful than it looks.
Petrol and diesel at the Delhi pump
The Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell publishes a daily retail price for four metros. On 4 August 2026 the Delhi figures were 102.12 rupees a litre for petrol and 95.20 rupees for diesel. That is the number to build your own-vehicle line on, and it is the number to check monthly rather than annually.
Why it has not moved since June
The same figures appear unchanged in the PPAC tables for every single day from 16 June to 4 August 2026, so Indian pump prices are administered in practice even under a nominally free-pricing regime. For planning, that is a gift: you can budget a delivery route or a client visit schedule for weeks at a fixed rupee-per-kilometre figure without hedging.
What it is not: a national price
Do not carry the Delhi figure to another city. On the same day, petrol cost 107.77 rupees a litre in Chennai, 111.21 in Mumbai and 113.51 in Kolkata, a spread of 11.39 rupees on the same litre, driven by state taxes rather than by distance. If your business runs vehicles in more than one state, each one needs its own line.
| Mode | What drives the cost | Who sets the price | Variance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Metro | Distance slab | The metro operator | Very low |
| Bus | Distance or flat stage | The city transport authority | Low, but timing varies |
| Autorickshaw | Meter, waiting, night rules | City authority, and the driver | Medium |
| Cab or bike taxi | Distance, time, surge | The platform | High |
| Your own vehicle | Fuel, servicing, insurance, parking | You, plus your state on tax | Low per trip, high fixed |
Building your own figure per trip
Two weeks of measurement gives you a number you will use for years.
The formula
Cost per trip equals the direct payment, plus fuel used multiplied by the posted Delhi price, plus the fixed annual costs of the vehicle divided by trips per year, plus your hourly value multiplied by door-to-door time. Run it once per mode on your three most frequent routes. Everything in it except the pump price has to come from your own record.
Filling in the fares nobody publishes nationally
There is no national metro fare, bus fare or autorickshaw tariff in India, because each is fixed by the operator or the transport authority of the city. Take them from the source: the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation for the metro, the Delhi Transport Corporation for the bus, and the transport department of the Delhi government for the autorickshaw tariff. Note them with the date you checked, because they change without much warning.
Two routes, measured honestly
Take a short cross-town run and a long radial one, and do each by all four modes across two weeks, logging door-to-door minutes and the amount actually paid. What usually emerges is that the metro wins on the long radial route and loses badly on the short cross-town one, and that the own-vehicle option only pays once you are making more than a certain number of trips a week. That threshold is the single most useful number this exercise produces.
| Worksheet line | Where you get it |
|---|---|
| Fare paid | Your own log, per trip, for two weeks |
| Fuel price | PPAC daily table for your city |
| Litres per trip | Odometer divided by observed mileage |
| Fixed vehicle cost | Insurance, servicing, road tax, parking, per year |
| Trips per year | Your own log, multiplied out |
| Door-to-door minutes | Measured, not estimated |
Paying for the commute with I am Beezy
A commute is the one recurring business cost with no client attached to it. Putting an income against it changes how the arithmetic feels, especially in the months when the business is not yet paying you properly.
What it pays, expressed in litres
I am Beezy pays you for viewing content — videos, articles, advertisements — with a reference range across the platform of 5 to 15 euros a day. At the Reserve Bank of India reference rate of 109.7165 rupees to the euro on 4 August 2026, that is roughly ₹550 to ₹1,645 a day, which at the Delhi pump price of 102.12 rupees is somewhere between five and sixteen litres of petrol. Convert at the day's rate, because the rupee moves against the euro.
Where the money lands
Earnings go to your usual payment method, which for most people in Delhi means the account behind their UPI application. Keep it the same account you pay for fuel and fares from, and your transport log builds itself out of the statement instead of a notebook.
Should an entrepreneur own the vehicle at all?
Only above a trip threshold you can now calculate, and the purchase price side of it moved recently.
What the tax reform changed on the purchase
Since 22 September 2025, small cars and motorcycles of 350cc and below moved from the 28 per cent GST slab to 18 per cent, under the GST Council's 56th meeting decisions. For a first work vehicle, that is a material change to the entry price and it is the reason to run the ownership calculation again if you last did it before that date.
What the used market is doing
MoSPI's June 2026 consumer price release recorded car and jeep prices down 6.89 per cent and motorcycles and scooters down 3.49 per cent over twelve months, while transport costs overall rose 4.31 per cent. Vehicles are getting cheaper to buy and dearer to run, which pushes the ownership threshold up: you need more trips to justify it than you did a year ago.
The cost your state adds after the purchase
Two lines on an owned vehicle are fixed by the state government rather than by the dealer, and neither has a national figure: road tax, set by each state's transport department, and third-party motor insurance, which is compulsory for every vehicle on the road. Get both quoted before you sign anything, because a favourable purchase price in one state can be undone by registration costs in another, and a vehicle registered where you do not operate creates paperwork you will spend hours on later. Add the annual total of both to the fixed-cost line of the worksheet above, then divide by your real trip count.
The two-wheeler taxi that changes the sums
Bike taxis are a mass-market mode in India with no European equivalent, and for a single passenger on a short cross-town run they undercut both the cab and the auto. Rapido built its business on this; Ola, Uber and inDrive also compete for the same trip. One Indian operator, Namma Yatri, takes no commission on the fare at all, which matters if you are on the driver's side of this market rather than the passenger's, though you should check whether it operates in your city.
Your next four weeks
Measure, then switch
Log every trip for two weeks before changing anything: mode, minutes, rupees. Then compute the four lines above. Almost everyone finds one route where they have been paying for a cab out of habit and one where the metro is costing them a client-facing hour.
What to renegotiate afterwards
Fixed monthly parking, a metro travel card, and the client meetings that could be a call. Those three decisions carry more money than any choice between two applications. And if the business is still in the months where every rupee of overhead hurts, a daily income from I am Beezy covers a good share of the week's travel while you get the measurements done.
