Taskrabbit Delivery (ex-Dolly) Review: Big-Item Gig Work

GigOdo Team · Published September 10, 2026 · Platform rules quoted from Taskrabbit's own pages; pay estimates attributed to their sources

What happened to Dolly

Dolly became Taskrabbit Delivery. Taskrabbit acquired the on-demand moving and delivery service on November 5, 2024, and on July 7, 2026 announced that Dolly was being rebranded as Taskrabbit Delivery nationwide. Typing dolly.com now lands you on taskrabbit.com/delivery, where a banner reads "Dolly is now Taskrabbit Delivery."

Dolly was a Seattle startup, founded in 2014, that raised more than $17 million and grew to roughly 45 cities before Updater bought it in 2021 and Taskrabbit took it over three years later. Taskrabbit itself has belonged to Ingka Group, the largest IKEA retailer, since 2017, which is why IKEA sits first on the Taskrabbit Delivery partner list.

For Helpers, the rebrand is mostly cosmetic. Taskrabbit's own transition FAQ says the Helper payment structure and schedule "will remain exactly the same," that you keep using the same Helper app, and that the process for bidding on and accepting jobs does not change. The one vocabulary change: a job is now a "task." The FAQ told Helpers to expect the switch toward the end of May 2026, and the public announcement followed in July.

What Taskrabbit Delivery is for gig workers

Taskrabbit Delivery is the big-and-bulky side of Taskrabbit: apartment moves, same-day retail delivery, and "truck and muscle" jobs where a customer needs a couch or a fridge moved. Everyday Taskrabbit, with its furniture assembly and TV mounting, stays a separate app and a separate pool of workers.

The retail side is the steady work. Taskrabbit Delivery names IKEA, Costco, Lowe's, West Elm, Pottery Barn, Casper, Purple, Mattress Firm, The Container Store, At Home, World Market, and American Signature as delivery partners, and the box-truck recruiting page adds Facebook Marketplace, Big Lots, and Best Buy. A store sells a sectional, and a Helper with a truck shows up to move it that day.

Unlike food delivery there is no ping-and-dash. Helpers browse available tasks in the app, request the ones that fit their vehicle and schedule, and get assigned. That is the "bidding" model the FAQ refers to, and it means your income depends on how quickly you claim the good tasks, the same dynamic our Curri driver review found in construction delivery.

There are two roles. A Helper is the truck plus the muscle: Taskrabbit's Helper page defines one as someone with a pickup truck, cargo van, box truck, or SUV with a trailer who can lift and carry 75 pounds or more. A Hand is the muscle alone, with no vehicle requirement, who assists Helpers or takes labor-only tasks. Hands can work a Saturday with gloves and a strong back, one of the few gig roles on this site that needs no car at all.

Passenger cars, minivans, and passenger vans do not qualify a Helper, per the requirements page. If you drive a sedan and want big-item work, the big and bulky delivery apps guide lists the platforms that take any car, starting with Roadie and Curri.

How Taskrabbit Delivery pay works

Pay is per task, shown before you request it, plus 100% of the customer's tip. Taskrabbit's pages describe bonus tasks that pay more, but publish no rate card, no per-mile figure, and no hourly floor. What the marketing pages do publish is an average: "Helpers make an average of $50/hr" and Hands "an average of $35/hr."

Those averages deserve a hard label. Taskrabbit does not say how they are calculated, whether they include drive time to the pickup, or how many Helpers they represent. Earlier Dolly marketing, as quoted in third-party reviews, advertised $40 or more per hour for Helpers and $25 or more for Hands. The advertised averages rose by $10 each while the transition FAQ says the pay formula did not change, which tells you the number is a marketing figure rather than a payroll statistic.

Customers, for reference, are quoted by the job. Move.org's December 2024 review priced a two-hour retail delivery with assembly at $270 and a four-hour small apartment move at $440, working out to about $60 per Helper hour billed. Whatever share of that reaches the Helper is not published.

What Helpers actually earn

The honest answer is that nobody outside Taskrabbit has measured it at scale. Gridwise, whose tracked medians anchor most of our platform reviews, publishes no Dolly or Taskrabbit Delivery figure. The best independent estimate is from SideHusl, which reviewed user feedback across Google Play, the App Store, and Glassdoor and found "little evidence" for the advertised rates.

Company claims from taskrabbit.com/delivery/helpers and the box-truck recruiting page, checked September 2026. SideHusl figures predate the rebrand; Taskrabbit says the pay structure is unchanged.

Two patterns from driver reports, which we attribute as reports rather than facts: box-truck owners see the larger tasks, while pickup owners are limited to smaller jobs, and pay disputes after task changes, such as a customer adding a second Helper mid-job, show up repeatedly in reviews. Screenshot every accepted task with its pay before you drive to it.

Requirements and onboarding

The bar is low for Hands and moderate for Helpers. Per Taskrabbit's requirements page, everyone must be 18 or older with a smartphone running Android 5.0 or iOS 11 or newer, a PayPal account for payouts, and a background check that the applicant pays for. Helpers add a valid driver's license, auto insurance matching the vehicle and their name, a qualifying truck or van, and the 75-pound lift. Hands can register with any government-issued ID.

Two costs come out of your pocket before the first task. SideHusl reported a $30 background check fee and a $20 penalty for dropping a task within 24 hours of its start; Taskrabbit does not publish either figure on its current pages, so treat both as reported and confirm in the app. The 2024 terms of service address customer cancellations only.

Coverage is 50 US metro areas, per the Helper page, from New York and Los Angeles through Phoenix, San Antonio, and San Jose. Driver-review coverage suggests the footprint has held near 45 to 50 cities since the acquisition rather than expanded, so check the list before assuming your suburb is in range.

Getting paid: twice a week, by PayPal

Taskrabbit Delivery pays twice weekly through PayPal, faster than most delivery apps' weekly cadence. Tasks completed Monday through Wednesday pay out on Friday; tasks completed Thursday through Sunday pay out on Tuesday. There is no instant-pay product, and there is no option other than PayPal, so open the account before you apply.

Twice-weekly pay helps cash flow on a platform where a single task can be a $150 box-truck job or a $20 labor hour. It does not change the bookkeeping. Every payout lands as gross, with nothing withheld, and PayPal's statement will not tell you which task, which miles, or which tip produced it. Record those per task, the day you do them.

Damage, insurance, and who carries the risk

The terms are blunt. The Dolly Terms of Service, last revised January 2024 and still the document linked from the Taskrabbit Delivery app, state that Dolly "is not responsible for the replacement or repair of any Item" damaged by a Helper, and that any dispute over the work is between the customer and the Helper. Read that as: the platform is a marketplace, and the Helper is the business.

Customers get $300 of included damage coverage per job and can buy up to $10,000 more at $1 per $100, per Dolly's published customer terms. That protects the customer's sectional. It does not protect you from a claim, a denied payout, or a deactivation after a scratched hardwood floor. Driver reports of denied damage claims and delayed post-acquisition payments are common enough in reviews to plan around.

On the vehicle side, the Insurance Information Institute's guidance that personal auto policies do not cover delivering goods for pay applies squarely here. The box-truck recruiting page mentions occupational accident insurance protection, but publishes no detail, so do not count on it. Price a business-use or commercial auto policy plus general liability before your first task, and put the premium into your cost per mile.

What a truck really costs per mile

This is the section that decides whether Helper work is a business or a hobby. Taskrabbit's pay ladder rewards bigger vehicles, and the temptation is to finance a truck for the gig. AAA's 2025 Your Driving Costs study prices a new half-ton pickup at about 98.5 cents per mile all-in at 15,000 miles a year, the most expensive class AAA measures, against 55.87 cents for a small sedan and an all-vehicle average of $11,577 a year, or about 77 cents a mile.

Run the claim through that number. At Taskrabbit's advertised $50 an hour, a Helper who drives 20 miles round trip per one-hour task in a new financed pickup spends about $19.70 of that hour on the truck before fuel receipts or insurance riders. At SideHusl's $20 to $30 range, the same 20 miles eats two-thirds of the low end. A paid-off older truck runs far less per marginal mile, and our guide to real cost per mile for gig driving shows how to compute yours from fill-ups instead of borrowing AAA's.

Deadhead makes it worse. A retail delivery pays for the drive from the store to the customer, not the drive from your house to the store or the empty trip home. The Roadie long-haul economics breakdown works through the same arithmetic, and the conclusion transfers: price every task on the round trip, and never buy a truck for a platform you have not run for two weeks with the vehicle you already own.

How it compares to Roadie, Lugg, and GoShare

Taskrabbit Delivery sits in the middle of the big-item niche: harder to enter than Roadie, easier than Lugg, with a labor-only role that GoShare also offers. Roadie takes any car and has the only measured data in the niche, a Gridwise 2025 median of $12.70 an hour and $1.58 per mile across 6,725 drivers. Lugg requires a pickup with a six-foot bed and a lift test at onboarding. GoShare's ceilings climb from a sedan to a box truck.

What Taskrabbit Delivery adds is the IKEA ecosystem and a retail partner list that reads like a furniture mall. Taskrabbit's stated goal for the rebrand is bridging a heavy delivery with the assembly job afterward, and a Helper who also qualifies as a Tasker could in principle collect both halves. Taskrabbit has not published how that cross-booking works for workers, so we note the possibility and stop there.

What it costs you is the same thing every truck app costs: a vehicle that eats margin, a claims process that favors the customer, and no independent number to hold the marketing against. The full eight-platform comparison lives in the big-and-bulky guide linked above.

Taxes: the 1099, the tips, and the miles nobody logs

Helpers and Hands are paid as independent businesses, so nothing is withheld. Self-employment tax of 15.3% applies to 92.35% of net earnings, and quarterly estimates are your job. The 1099-NEC threshold rose to $2,000 for payments made in 2026, so a Hand who works a dozen Saturdays may get no form at all and still owe tax on every dollar PayPal delivered.

The big deduction is mileage, and it is bigger here than in food delivery because the trips are longer and the vehicle is heavier. The 2026 IRS rate is split: 72.5 cents per mile for January through June and 76 cents from July 1. A Helper covering 600 business miles a month for the rest of 2026 is looking at roughly $456 a month of deduction, and the 2026 mileage deduction calculator will price your own miles at both rates.

Taskrabbit Delivery gives you a task history, not a mileage log. IRS Publication 463 wants the date, miles, destination, and business purpose of each drive, recorded at or near the time, and the empty leg home from a customer is part of that record when you are working. GigOdo records the whole round trip automatically and free, with no platform login, so the log exists whether or not you remembered to start it.

Verdict: who Taskrabbit Delivery fits

Taskrabbit Delivery fits someone who already owns a pickup or van, lives inside one of its 50 metros, and wants scheduled retail delivery tasks alongside other truck apps. It also fits a Hand with no vehicle who wants paid physical work on weekends. It does not fit anyone planning to finance a truck on the strength of a $50-an-hour average that no outside source has been able to reproduce.

Go in knowing the rebrand changed the name and not the terms: bidding for tasks, damage disputes on your shoulders, twice-weekly PayPal, and a pay figure you will have to measure yourself. GigOdo tracks mileage, earnings, and tips per platform so you can rank Taskrabbit Delivery against the rest of our platform reviews on your own numbers, and the mileage log that survives an IRS audit covers what those records need to contain.

FAQ

Sources: Taskrabbit press release, "Rebranding Dolly to Taskrabbit Delivery Nationwide," July 7, 2026; Taskrabbit press release, "Taskrabbit Acquires Dolly," November 5, 2024; Taskrabbit Support, "FAQ: Dolly is becoming Taskrabbit Delivery" (pay structure, app, bidding, terminology); Taskrabbit Delivery Helper page (roles, requirements, pay claims, payout schedule, cities); Taskrabbit Delivery box truck and cargo van page; Taskrabbit Delivery homepage (retail partners, "Dolly is now Taskrabbit Delivery"); Dolly Terms of Service, revised January 4, 2024; SideHusl, Dolly review, updated April 12, 2025; Move.org, Dolly moving review, December 2024 (customer pricing, damage coverage); GeekWire on the Updater acquisition, July 2021 (founding, funding, cities); AAA Your Driving Costs 2025; Gridwise Roadie earnings data, 2025; Insurance Information Institute on commercial use; IRS standard mileage rates; IRS Publication 463; IRS Topic 554. GigOdo is not affiliated with Taskrabbit, Dolly, or IKEA. This article is general information, not tax advice.