Full-time, part-time or hourly: which maid does your house need?
"Full-time maid" means four different things in four different Nashik households. Sorting out which one you mean is most of the decision.
The four arrangements, plainly
Live-in help stays in the house and is available across the day. It is the most expensive arrangement in every sense — money, space, and the management load of having an employee living with you — and it is genuinely needed far less often than it is asked for.
Full-day help comes for a long block, typically covering several kinds of work. Part-time or daily help is the Nashik default: a fixed slot of one to three hours covering a defined combination of tasks. Hourly, on-demand help is booked per occasion with no ongoing commitment at all.
maidigo staffs the middle two and the last one: daily monthly plans on a fixed slot, and hourly bookings. We do not place live-in staff, because doing that responsibly is a different business with different duties of care.
- Live-in: maximum availability, maximum cost and management. Rarely the actual need.
- Full-day: a long block covering several jobs, for larger households.
- Daily / part-time: a fixed slot, defined tasks — what most Nashik homes want.
- Hourly: per occasion, no commitment, best value for genuine one-offs.
Work out the hours honestly
Add up the actual work rather than the anxiety about it. Daily brooming, mopping and utensils in a 2 BHK is a bounded job of one to two hours, not a full day. Cooking two meals for a family of four is a separate bounded job. Laundry is a third.
When households conclude they need a full-time maid, it is usually because three separate jobs were being imagined as one shapeless one. Scoped separately, two daily plans on different slots very often cost less than one full-day arrangement, and each one has a clear standard you can hold it to.
The cost nobody counts: managing it
Every informal arrangement carries an ongoing management load — chasing when someone does not come, renegotiating when the work changes, handling leave and festivals, finding cover during an illness. It does not show up in the monthly figure, but it is paid in mornings.
That load rises steeply with the size of the arrangement. A live-in or full-day informal hire is effectively a small employment relationship that you are administering. A defined daily plan through a service moves verification, scope and replacement cover off your plate, which for most two-income households is the real reason to use one.
What changes with a new baby or an elderly parent
These are the two situations where households reach for "full-time" fastest, and they are also the two where it is most often the wrong shape. A newborn does not need a general maid for twelve hours; it needs japa care, which is a specific skill for a specific few weeks, plus whatever cleaning and cooking the house already needed. Those are different people doing different jobs, and buying them separately is both cheaper and better.
The same is true of daytime childcare. A nanny for four hours while both parents take calls is a bounded, staffable job. A vague all-day presence is neither, and it is far harder to hold to any standard — including the standard of who is actually watching the child at three in the afternoon.
A rule of thumb
If you need help most days on a predictable set of tasks, take a monthly plan and size it honestly. If you need help occasionally or unpredictably, book hourly and stop paying for a routine you do not have. If you genuinely need multiple jobs covered daily, book two plans rather than inventing one vague full-time role — the scope stays clear and you can drop one without losing both.
And size for the house you have, not the house on a bad week. Plans are easier to extend than to argue down, and a slot that is honestly scoped from day one is the one that is still running a year later.