Daily delivery rounds and time slots for LPG cylinder distributors
TL;DR Gasround turns an LPG distributor's daily list of refill bookings into delivery rounds for each delivery man, with a time window the customer can see and a photo or code at the door. The distributor pays a small monthly fee. The big route-planning tools are built for enterprises, and this one is built for a gas agency.
India has 25,611 LPG distributorships serving 33.14 crore active domestic customers, which averages about 12,939 homes per distributor[1]. My arithmetic on the same report's sales figures puts the typical agency at roughly 170–180 cylinder deliveries a day, carried by a handful of men on tricycles, two-wheelers and small tempos.
Most agencies plan those rounds from memory and a printed list. Customers get no time window, deliveries bunch up by lane instead of by booking date, and the owner has no idea which man is where. Supply is tight too - sales in April–June 2026 fell 15.6% year on year and new connections were put on hold during the West Asia crisis[1]. Every refill now has to reach the right home, in the right order.
Every morning the distributor uploads or syncs the day's pending bookings. Gasround clusters them by lane and building, respects booking order so older bookings go first, and builds a round for each delivery man sized to what his vehicle can carry. The customer gets a chat-app or SMS message with a two-hour window. At the door the delivery man records the drop with a photo, and empties collected are logged so stock adds up at day end.
The owner sees a simple board showing rounds done, cylinders out, homes missed and why. Missed homes roll into tomorrow's first round on their own.
The routing maths is cheap to rent now[2], so the product is really the workflow around it. That means a phone app that works on a delivery man's basic smartphone, Hindi and regional-language screens, and reports an agency owner will actually open. It doesn't take bookings or payments, because those stay with the oil company's systems.
The agency owner pays and the delivery staff use it. My test price is ₹2,500–5,000 a month per agency, which is an assumption to check. It has to beat the cost of a missed-delivery complaint and a delivery man's idle hour, not an enterprise licence. Rural and remote-area agencies, over half the count[1], have longer rounds and may value it more, though they pay less.
Supply restrictions since the West Asia crisis have made refill order a live issue for agencies[1]. Route solving that once needed an in-house team is now sold per use, and one big cloud provider's fleet routing API charges US$30 (about ₹2,900) per 1,000 events at low volume, with 1,000 free a month[2]. Cheap smartphones mean every delivery man can carry the app.
There's no public figure for software spend by LPG distributors. The bottom-up count is firm though - 25,611 agencies[1]. At my assumed ₹30,000–60,000 a year each, full coverage would be about ₹77–154 Cr a year, so this is a niche business. On the adjacent side, India's route optimisation software market was US$141.2 million in 2023 (about ₹1,370 Cr), mostly enterprise[3].
One dispatch-planning platform sells to large retailers, FMCG companies and 3PLs, with 360+ clients[4]. Another sells delivery management to large manufacturers and industrial firms[5]. A third offers beat planning, paid for by CPG brands for their sales and distribution teams[6]. None of them is priced or designed for a single gas agency with six delivery men. I found no product aimed at LPG distributors' delivery rounds.
| Difficulty | Moderate (31/100) |
| Starting capital | ₹35–60 L |
| Time to launch | 4–6 months |
The software is modest. The first hard part is getting the daily booking list out of each agency's oil-company system without retyping it. The second is adoption, because delivery men paid per cylinder may push back on a round that isn't their own, and selling to 25,000 small owners one at a time is slow going.
No special licence. Gasround is software for distributors, so you only need the baseline plus a few permissions.
Building this outside India? The categories above usually have a local equivalent, so check with your own regulator.
Don't let AI change booking priority or reject a customer on its own. Booking rules belong to the oil company, and errors land on the agency.
Want to work out the AI layer for Gasround? Talk to Yash →
Worth a look if you know LPG distribution, ideally from a family agency, and can sell through distributor associations. If you're after a large venture outcome then pass, because the ceiling is modest. Prove one thing first - 20 agencies use it every working day for two months and cut missed deliveries.
Plan for roughly ₹35–60 L, mostly on a small product team and field sales through distributor associations. Routing APIs are cheap to rent.
It can be a steady, modest business. Agency owners pay small monthly fees, so profit depends on signing many agencies and keeping them using it daily.
Yes, wherever cylinders still go door to door through local distributors. Check local data protection and messaging rules before you launch.
The free Gasround validation kit has the line-by-line capital breakdown, the effort scoring, the data and distributorship checklist, a 14-day validation sprint with pass/fail targets, a 90-day launch plan, 10 interview questions for agency owners, and 5 assumptions to test. Download the kit →
Thinking about building Gasround or something close to it? The make-or-break work is getting daily booking data out cleanly and winning over delivery staff, and I'm glad to think that through with you. If you need a hand, you know where to find me. Talk to Yash →
For illustration only. Names are fictional and ideas hypothetical; sourced facts are real but may be out of date. Nothing here is legal, financial or professional advice, and Yash Khatri is not personally liable for any use of it. Read the full disclaimer.