Postmates Review: What Happened to Postmates, and Is It Worth Driving for in 2024?

Again, Postmates is a food and grocery delivery service. It was acquired by Uber in December 2020, who subsequently discontinued the Postmates app for drivers.

The customer-facing Postmates app still exists, and it’s still available on the App Store (for iOS) and Google Play (for Android). However, when customers place Postmates orders, they’re sent to Uber Eats drivers, who can accept them using the Uber driver app.

Uber tags Postmates deliveries with a label that says “Postmates OrderID,” but they’re functionally the same as regular Uber Eats orders.

This means that if you want to become a Postmates driver, you have to sign up with Uber Eats. We’ll explain how to do that further down in this review.

How does Postmates / Uber Eats work?

As a delivery driver for Uber Eats, you’ll be able to see orders for food and groceries in the app. After accepting an order, you’ll drive to the business, pick up the items, and deliver them to the customer.

Sometimes, you’ll be expected to directly hand them off. However, these days, many orders are “contact-free,” meaning you can just leave them at the customer’s door.

You can deliver using a car, motorcycle, or scooter. It’s technically possible to deliver with a bike or even on foot, but this is only practical in dense urban areas (i.e., downtown).

Most Postmates/Uber drivers use their own vehicles. If you don’t have one, you can rent one from an Uber-affiliated rental service, but this costs money, which will cut into your profits.

Because Uber folded Postmates into its own app, driving for Postmates is now essentially the same as driving for Uber Eats. You can read our review of Uber Eats for a comprehensive list of its pros and cons.

Here’s a quick summary:

On average, Uber Eats drivers make around $20 per hour.

That said, you won’t actually get paid on an hourly basis; you’ll get paid per order. Your pay will be determined by three factors:

• Base pay: This is usually between $4 and $12 per delivery. The exact amount is determined by how far you have to drive, how much demand there currently is for drivers, and where you live (rates are usually higher in larger cities).
• Promotions: Uber occasionally offers “boosts” and other promotions, which will increase your fare on each order. They tend to do this to encourage drivers to work during busy periods.
• Tips: Customers can leave tips, although they aren’t required to do so. If they do, you get to keep 100% of what they give you.

You’ll be able to see the base pay on each order and any promotions applied to it before you accept it.

Do Postmates orders pay more or less than Uber Eats orders?

Although customers place Postmates orders through a different app, there’s no evidence that their fares are any different than the ones on “normal” Uber Eats orders.

Since you can evaluate each order before accepting it, the best strategy is to pay attention to the projected earnings and how far you have to drive before deciding whether or not to take it. You don’t need to worry about which service the order came from.

It’s worth noting that the payment system described above is close to the one Postmates originally used, back when they operated their own driver app. In fact, virtually every delivery driving service uses a similar pricing algorithm, and our research has shown that they all offer comparable pay.

How you’ll get paid as a Postmates / Uber Eats driver

You can cash out your earnings in any of three ways:

Postmates / Uber Eats Payment Methods

Uber’s payment methods are more or less in line with what the original Postmates app offered.

You can count on Uber to pay you in full and on time; none of the Uber drivers we’ve spoken to reported any trouble accessing their earnings.

Becoming a delivery driver is relatively easy. Most people will be able to meet Uber’s requirements and sign up.

The exact requirements differ slightly depending on your delivery vehicle. Consult the table below for details:

Postmates / Uber Eats Requirements by Mode of Transportation

Uber’s background check

When you sign up for Uber, you’ll need to provide your Social Security number and pass a background check. This will be performed by Checkr, the same third-party company that Postmates used. (Checkr is the biggest player in this space and also performs background checks for DoorDash and Instacart.)

The check isn’t particularly stringent, and most people are able to pass it. You’ll probably be fine even if you have a few black marks on your record (e.g., misdemeanors or minor driving violations). You’ll only run into trouble if you’ve been convicted of a felony or have major vehicular offenses (e.g., a DUI) on your driving record from the past 7 years.

We’ve asked several drivers how long their background checks took to process. Matt Miller, one experienced Uber driver, told us that in his experience, you’ll usually get your results in 1–3 days, but that occasionally, administrative hiccups may delay them for up to a week.

If your application takes substantially longer than that, contact Uber’s driver support team and ask about its status.

Where can you work for Postmates / Uber Eats?

Uber Eats operates in every major city in the US. You can check whether they’re available in your city on their website, but that list isn’t exhaustive, so if you live in a smaller town and don’t see it, it’s still worth trying to sign up.

The actual Postmates app is available in a slightly different set of cities than Uber Eats. However, that isn’t something that you need to worry about as a driver.

As mentioned, it’s no longer possible to sign up as a Postmates driver. The “Sign up to deliver” button on the Postmates delivery page now directs to Uber’s homepage.

You can sign up as an Uber Eats driver in two places:

• Uber’s mobile apps: If you’ve downloaded either Uber (for passengers) or Uber Eats (for customers) on your phone, you can use it to register as a driver. Launch the app, click the Account button in the bottom right corner of the screen, and then click on Earn by driving or delivering in the list that pops up.
• On Uber’s website: Navigate to Uber’s homepage using the link above and click Sign up to drive.

Uber will walk you through the remainder of the registration process. You’ll have to provide:

• Your Social Security number
• A picture of your driver’s license, vehicle registration, and auto insurance (unless you plan on delivering by bike/foot)
• A photo of yourself to use as a profile picture

At the end of the process, Uber will prompt you to download their app for drivers. You can also get it using the buttons below.

Download the Uber driver app

App Store Google Play

Once you install the Uber driver app, all you have to do is wait for your background check to clear. Once it does, you’ll be able to sign in and accept both Postmates and Uber Eats orders.

When you decide whether this gig is worth your time, you have to consider:

• How much money you’ll actually take home after you account for your expenses
• Whether you enjoy the work itself, or whether there’s something else you’d rather do

We’ll look at both of these questions below. Uber’s acquisition of Postmates doesn’t actually change the answer to either very much; as we’ve alluded to, while there are slight differences between the major delivery gig apps, they’re more alike than they are different.

Put another way, if Postmates was still an independent service, driving for it would probably be much the same as driving for Uber Eats (or another one of its competitors, such as Instacart or DoorDash). The Uber-Postmates merger doesn’t change the game in a significant way.

How much will expenses eat into your profits with Postmates / Uber Eats?

Driving for a service like Postmates has a lot of expenses associated with it. The biggest one is fuel, which the company won’t pay for. You’ll also need to set aside a chunk of your earnings to take care of vehicle maintenance and your yearly taxes.

Your exact expenses will depend on several factors, including how fuel-efficient your vehicle is, but as a rough guide, plan on budgeting:

• Gas: 10% of your earnings
• Maintenance: 10% of your earnings
• Taxes: 15% of your earnings

All told, your expenses will probably eat up around 35% of what you make, leaving you with 65%. In other words, if you’re able to earn an hourly rate of $20 (your gross profits), you’ll take home just $13 of that.

An effective wage of $13 per hour isn’t terrible; it’s considerably higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25, although it’s below the minimum wage in 14 states and the District of Columbia, as of February 2024. 1 It’s comparable to what you’d make at a lot of entry-level retail jobs, which makes sense—like them, running deliveries is a relatively simple gig that most people can do.

What is driving for Postmates / Uber Eats actually like?

Now that you’ve calculated a more realistic take-home pay, the question becomes: is driving for Uber Eats worth it for $13 per hour?

Obviously, the answer to that depends on your personality and on what you’re looking for from your side hustle. That said, we’ve interviewed a number of gig workers for our delivery app reviews, and we can share what they’ve told us about the work.

Delivering is usually a low-stress job

Most people seem to find driving for apps like Uber Eats reasonably pleasant. The biggest source of stress is traffic (particularly if you drive during rush hour), but you don’t have to interact with customers very much. Again, in the post-pandemic world, many people opt for contact-free deliveries, meaning you’ll just leave the food or groceries on their doorsteps.

When you drive for Uber Eats, you can keep yourself occupied by listening to music or a podcast—one of the biggest perks of the job, according to the drivers we’ve spoken to.

You have complete control over your schedule

As a gig worker, you’re effectively your own boss. When you drive for Uber, you don’t have to commit to shifts ahead of time. You can do it whenever you want and stop working the second you want a break.

This flexibility is another significant perk of the job. It means that you can make your work for Postmates and Uber an occasional side hustle, a full-time gig, or anything in between. It depends on what you’re looking for.

You may have to reject a lot of lowball offers

This is the main source of frustration for Uber Eats drivers. A lot of the offers on the app just aren’t very good, and you may spend more time than you’d like waiting for a worthwhile one to come in.

You can partially mitigate this by downloading other delivery apps and switching between them to hunt for the best offers. Sometimes, when it’s a slow day on Uber Eats, there might be more lucrative offers on Instacart, and vice versa.

If you’re not sure if this gig is for you, the easiest way to find out is to just download the app and give it a try. You don’t have to commit to driving for any particular period, so you have nothing to lose by completing a few deliveries and seeing how much you like it.