When Google and Meta Became Too Expensive, CashKaro Found Its Moment

For most of its existence, CashKaro occupied a comfortable but somewhat peripheral corner of Indian e-commerce — a rewards app that handed shoppers a portion of the affiliate commissions it earned from brands. Useful, certainly. But not exactly mission-critical infrastructure. 

That positioning may now be changing, and for reasons that have less to do with CashKaro's own choices than with a structural crisis gathering in digital advertising. 

The company claims to have reported revenue of ₹600 crore for FY26, up roughly 72% from ₹348 crore the previous year. More quietly notable: EBITDA losses narrowed by 40%, from ₹29.2 crore to ₹17.7 crore, even as the platform enabled over ₹10,000 crore in gross merchandise value for its brand partners. Marketing expenditure across CashKaro and its sister platform EarnKaro rose by only 7.6% — meaning growth is no longer being bought, at least not at the same ratio it once was. 

The numbers alone are clean. But they only make sense against a backdrop that goes beyond the company. 

The CAC problem no one solved 

Over the past three years, the cost of acquiring a customer through performance campaigns on Google and Meta has risen sharply across almost every consumer category in India. Part of this is platform maturity — auction-based ad systems get more expensive as more advertisers chase the same inventory. Part of it is the post-pandemic correction, as brands that grew accustomed to cheap digital reach began competing more aggressively for attention. And part of it is measurement — as attribution windows shrink and privacy changes reduce signal fidelity, brands are paying more for less certainty about what's actually working. 

For e-commerce and D2C brands, which have historically leaned hardest on performance marketing, this has forced a reckoning. A model that worked at ₹150 CAC looks very different at ₹600. 

"As brands look to improve the efficiency of their marketing spend, many are shifting budgets from Google & Meta to affiliate-led performance marketing models like ours," said Rohan Bhargava, co-founder of CashKaro and EarnKaro. "As customer acquisition cost continues to rise on these platforms, brands are increasingly seeing 4–10x better returns through affiliate models." 

The affiliate model's structural advantage in a high-CAC environment is straightforward: brands pay only on conversion, not on traffic or impressions. There is no wasted spend on clicks that don't convert. CashKaro takes a commission per sale; a portion of that goes back to the user as cashback. The transaction only costs the brand money when it generates revenue for the brand. 

Operating leverage, finally 

The financial trajectory visible in CashKaro's historical numbers tells a complicated story. Sales grew from ₹98.8 crore in FY21 to ₹217 crore in FY22, then spent two years in a slower growth phase — ₹248.9 crore in FY23, ₹282.3 crore in FY24 — before accelerating again to ₹341.3 crore in FY25 and now reportedly ₹600 crore in FY26. 

What's striking about the recent phase is that it coincides with improving unit economics rather than deteriorating ones. Historically, scaling a consumer internet platform in India has meant spending ahead of revenue — acquiring users at a loss and hoping the cohort economics eventually justify the outlay. Gross margins in that screengrab from the company's public filings were running at 100% through FY23 before dropping to 66.1% in FY25, suggesting some shift in the cost structure. But EBITDA losses per rupee of revenue have been narrowing, which is the signal that matters more. 

"This year, we grew our revenues by 72% while reducing losses by almost half. By design, we are unit economics positive on every transaction," said Swati Bhargava, co-founder. "Cashback is a billion-dollar business in the US, China and Europe — and CashKaro is set to surpass them all, especially with our suite of India-centric products like EarnKaro." 

The claim about unit economics per transaction is significant. It means the platform isn't subsidising transactions to drive volume — each sale already clears its direct costs. What remains is the path to covering fixed overhead, which is where the leverage in the revenue growth becomes relevant. 

EarnKaro and the creator economy bet 

The less-discussed part of CashKaro's business is EarnKaro, its affiliate marketing platform that allows individuals — homemakers, students, micro-influencers, Telegram channel operators — to share deals and earn commissions on resulting purchases. 

The platform claims 80% market share on Telegram among e-commerce affiliate channels, and says top earners are making up to ₹40 lakh per month. Whether or not the upper end of that range reflects a typical experience, the broader phenomenon is real: a large number of people in India are now earning meaningful supplemental income by sharing shopping links through their existing social networks. 

This matters for CashKaro in two ways. First, EarnKaro is a distribution layer that reaches audiences — Tier 2 and 3 cities, non-English speakers, shoppers who discover products through WhatsApp forwards rather than Google searches — that conventional digital advertising struggles to access efficiently. Second, it turns every EarnKaro user into a motivated promoter with a direct financial incentive to drive conversions, which is a different quality of engagement than paid reach. 

"Via CashKaro and EarnKaro, we are able to target a wide variety of online shoppers for brands — ranging from corporate professionals to nano influencers, students, homemakers and even shoppers from Tier 2-6 cities," Rohan Bhargava added. 

What the numbers don't yet show 

There are questions the FY26 results leave open. The gross margin compression from 100% to 66% in FY25 warrants scrutiny — it likely reflects the cost of cashback payouts scaling faster than commissions earned, or a shift in the partner mix toward lower-margin categories. Whether that reverses in FY26 will matter for the path to EBITDA breakeven. 

The company says it has paid out over ₹2,000 crore in cashback to users to date — a figure designed to signal trust and scale, but also one that raises questions about the long-term cashback rate as the platform grows. As brand partners become larger contributors to GMV, their negotiating leverage on commission rates increases, which could squeeze the margin available to pass back to users. 

Borrowings on the balance sheet are zero across all reported years, which is unusual and suggests the company has not taken on debt. Net worth has fluctuated — ₹68 crore in FY21, spiking to ₹173.6 crore in FY23 after what was likely a fundraise, before declining to ₹112 crore by FY25 as losses accumulated. Asset base has also been declining since FY23, from ₹207.6 crore to ₹160.7 crore in FY25, as per regulatory filings accessed by business intelligence firm Tofler.  

None of this suggests distress. But it does suggest that the path to profitability runs through continued operating leverage on the existing cost base — and that another year of 72% revenue growth at stable costs would change the picture significantly. 

The affiliate marketing tailwind 

The broader context is that performance marketing's share of digital ad spend in India is growing, and affiliate-based models are a specific beneficiary of that shift. The model is not new — Amazon Associates is decades old — but its relevance has increased precisely as the alternatives have become more expensive and less measurable. 

For CashKaro, the argument is that it sits at the intersection of three trends that are all moving in its direction: the rising cost of platform advertising, the growth of creator-led commerce, and the increasing price sensitivity of Indian consumers who are, as the company puts it, developing a "cashback habit." 

Whether those tailwinds are durable enough to carry the business to profitability before the balance sheet requires another infusion is the question FY27 will start to answer.