How Much Profit Is There in a Mobile Recharge Business? Honest Numbers

Most articles on this answer with percentages and leave you to guess the volume. Here are three concrete profiles instead.

Profile one: small corner shop

A grocery with a recharge counter, one operator, mostly regulars.

Not a living. But it costs almost nothing to run and pulls people into a shop that sells other things.

Profile two: dedicated counter near a bus stand

Profile three: sub-distributor with a downline

Sells directly and supplies fifteen retailers below.

What the three have in common

• Volume is everything. At these margins there is no clever pricing trick. Only throughput.
• Deposit commission is roughly half the profit. Most sellers ignore it entirely.
• The downline model scales, the counter model does not. A counter is limited by how many people walk past.

Costs people forget

• Idle balance. ৳20,000 sitting in an account is ৳20,000 not doing anything else.
• Wrong-number recharges. Budget for a few a year. They are not recoverable.
• Bad credit. The single biggest killer. One unpaid ৳1,000 at 1.5% needs ৳67,000 of sales to recover.

When it is worth doing

Flexiload works as an attachment to an existing shop, or as a platform under which you build a downline. As a standalone counter with no other income it rarely clears a decent wage. Go in with that expectation and the business is a reasonable one.