• Amazon is testing a new 24/7 delivery service, offering premium slots for faster shipping options.
• Amazon's new delivery model can add high costs, but increased sales volume could help turn a profit.
• Amazon is also testing premium, faster deliveries for an extra fee.

Amazon built the "Everything Store." Now it's trying to become the every-hour store.

The e-commerce giant is testing a new delivery system that breaks the day into 10 distinct windows spanning 24 hours, according to internal documents obtained by Business Insider.

That's a meaningful expansion from Amazon's traditional delivery hours, which typically run from 6 am to 10 pm. The new structure effectively turns delivery into a rolling, all-day cycle, with faster options carrying premium fees.

The initiative, led by Udit Madan, Amazon SVP of worldwide operations, began as a pilot program with plans to potentially expand across the network later this year, according to the documents.

Selling speed

If successful, it would mark one of the most significant changes to Amazon's delivery model in years, shifting the company from offering fast shipping as a default to selling speed as a premium product.

As part of the effort, Amazon has explored charging extra fees for fast delivery options, including 45-minute and 2.5-hour services, according to the documents.

By expanding delivery hours and introducing paid upgrades for faster service, Amazon is trying to turn the final and most expensive stretch of its logistics network into a new source of profit.

According to internal projections, Amazon projects the new delivery fees and higher sales volume will ultimately make faster shipping a meaningful profit driver, even as it expects hundreds of millions of dollars in near-term costs.

"Explore avenues to monetize (charge ship-fee) on the last 1-hr of delivery," one of the documents stated.

Starting as a small pilot

An Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider the company is conducting a "small pilot in a few US locations" to test a new delivery structure that will "introduce shorter delivery windows" and provide customers with "more frequent delivery options throughout the day."

Amazon has not decided on the future rollout of the new program and is evaluating customer response before deciding whether to expand it more broadly, the spokesperson added.

This is unrelated to last week's launch of 1-hour and 3-hour delivery options, the spokesperson also said. That built on a limited 30-minute ultrafast service introduced last year.

"We are always innovating on behalf of customers and continue to find new ways of offering them lower prices, greater selection, and more convenience," the spokesperson said in an email statement.

Slicing up a day

Under the new system, Amazon divides the day into named, overlapping windows, each roughly three hours long.

The windows span early-morning slots like 3 am to 6 am through evening and overnight periods such as 8 pm to 11 pm and 11 pm to 4 am, each with internal codenames ranging from "Sunrise" and "Coffee" to "Nightowl."

The new system also gives Amazon tighter control over how delivery options are presented.

According to the documents, Amazon wants to show customers specific arrival times, making delivery feel precise and predictable, not just fast. For example, it wants to say the package "arrives in 45 minutes," instead of a window range, the documents showed.

The Amazon spokesperson said the company already provides delivery estimates like "arrive by," and, in some cases, more precise timing as it continues to improve accuracy over time. Amazon is not moving to "exact, minute-by-minute scheduling," the spokesperson added.

Amazon believes a steady, deliberate rollout of the new delivery service will help it better learn and measure the impact before expanding across the full network, according to one of the documents.

Speed is expensive

The plan to charge for faster delivery marks a broader shift for Amazon. For years, the company bundled new perks into Prime at no extra cost. Now it's increasingly charging for premium features, from ad-free Prime Video and Whole Foods deliveries to services like One Medical.

For the faster delivery fee, Amazon benchmarked similar services from Walmart, Instacart, DoorDash, and UberEats, one of the documents showed.

The Amazon spokesperson said this is not a shift away from "fast, free delivery" or "a change in approach." The Prime membership continues to offer "significant value, including fast, free delivery on millions of items, alongside optional faster delivery options in some cases," the spokesperson added.

The push for all-day delivery and speed, however, comes at a cost.

One estimate, based on expanding the service to all sites by July, projects more than $330 million in costs this year and over $780 million next year. A slower rollout, reaching full scale by September 2026, would bring next year's costs closer to $490 million, according to the documents.

At the same time, Amazon expects faster shipping to drive higher order volume and revenue, with the goal of ultimately making the model pay for itself.

The company projects the fully scaled program will increase sub-same-day delivery volume by at least 40 million units this year alone, helping offset the added costs through higher sales and new revenue streams, including premium delivery fees. Those fees are expected to generate at least $20 million in incremental revenue this year, according to the documents.

Over time, Amazon expects the model to turn profitable, projecting about $40 million in operating profit this year and roughly $260 million in 2027 if fully rolled out by September 2026, the documents added.

That helps explain why Amazon is moving quickly to expand all-day delivery. The company wants to "blitz scale" the model across its network this year after the current pilot test, according to one of the documents.

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• Uber has partnered with at least a dozen robotaxi players in the past few years.
• The ride-hailing giant is spreading its bets in an industry that still has no clear winner.
• The investments also stimulate a robotaxi economy that's not ruled by a singular player.

By Dara Khosrowshahi's telling, the robotaxi future doesn't belong to one company: Multiple vendors supply the fleet as driverless cars expand the market, and in the middle of it all, Uber stands as the demand gatekeeper.

The ride-hailing giant's latest deal blitz seems designed to ensure this is the future that materializes.

Uber announced three new robotaxi partnerships in the past few weeks with Zoox, Wayve-Nissan, and Rivian. In less than half a decade, the company has secured at least a dozen deals, including with WeRide, AVride, May Mobility, Momenta, Pony.AI, Wayve, Baidu's Apollo Go, Motional, and Lucid-Nuro.

Still, less than a half-dozen of Uber's partners have deployed fully driverless, paid robotaxi operations, and only one, Waymo, operates in the US. Uber has a joint deployment with Waymo in Atlanta, Austin, and Phoenix, but in other cities, Waymo is a competitor.

Uber's partnership spree is less about seeking the singular, dominant player of autonomous driving. Instead, analysts told Business Insider that Uber is ensuring multiple vendors can participate in the expensive business of robotaxis — fending off the real risk of a Waymo or Tesla scaling on its own — and giving itself a stake in the robotaxi economy by being the aggregator of choice.

"The more diversified the supplier base, the better for the network in the middle, which is Uber," Mark Mahaney, an Uber analyst for Evercore ISI, told Business Insider.

Uber's defense and offense

Uber abandoned its in-house self-driving division years ago. Today, the ride-hailing company is targeting partnerships, including companies that, unlike Waymo, have expressed no interest in making their own apps, such as Nuro and Hyundai's Motional.

Instead, it is going the partnership route to shape a multiplayer market with companies that have expressed no interest in developing their own apps, including Nuro and Hyundai's Motional.

Those partnerships are not just about hedging, said Lloyd Walmsley, an Uber analyst for Mizuho Financial Group. By joining the investor roster, a giant like Uber puts its stamp of approval on those companies, thus attracting other investors that can help fund a smaller outfit, he said.

"The bets they're making aren't that big relative to their market cap," Walmsley said of Uber. "So it's in their interest to put a little bit of capital out there that then attracts even more capital from third parties that will build the ecosystem for them."

Laura Major, the CEO of Motional, framed the stakes more bluntly. She told Business Insider that autonomy — and having multiple players — is "existential" for Uber.

"If there's one winner, that's going to be a problem for them," Major said. "I think it creates a huge risk if that robotaxi partner starts their own ride-hail service."

Uber's strategy, through that lens, is defensive. Waymo has shown it can offer commercial robotaxis with its own app and fleet maintenance, and Tesla remains a looming threat as it works on Robotaxi. If one or both companies can control the car, the software, and the customer relationship at scale, Uber's position weakens.

However, Uber's bets are also opportunistic. Walmsley said that if Uber can add more autonomous options that bring down the cost of human-driven rides, the company can increase demand, not just cannibalize the volume of trips that exist today.

Mahaney agreed that Uber's strategy can expand the total addressable market — in this case, the total pool of ride bookings Uber could eventually capture. He added that a larger group of partners could also help Uber secure more favorable deal terms.

One or two players could "probably extract pretty aggressive terms from Uber," Mahaney said. "If there are five to 10, then actually Uber gets more negotiating leverage."

Who will stay in the robotaxi race?

The gap between signing a partnership and putting thousands of safe, fully driverless cars on the road remains wide. Most of Uber's partners have yet to deploy a fully driverless, paid service.

Motional believes cost could be the decisive factor. Alan Hall, Motional's director of communications, said flashy demos and features will matter less than who can scale the cheapest and safest ride.

Mahaney, the Evercore ISI analyst, similarly said that having a few cars in one city proves far less than having a company that can sustain a large commercial fleet. Until then, Uber is placing bets on a field that still has no clear shape, he said.

"There are a lot of players out there," Major, the Motional CEO, said. "No one knows quite who's going to survive this phase."

An Uber spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

• Pay for gig work varies significantly across apps, a new Gridwise report found.
• The report estimated hourly pay rates for ride-hailing, delivery, and other types of gig work.
• Taskrabbit, Walmart's Spark, and Uber ranked among the highest-paying apps, Gridwise found.

The gig economy has grown to include apps from Uber to Instacart. They don't all pay the same.

Average hourly pay on the apps varied in 2025, according to data analytics company Gridwise, which analyzed about 1 billion tasks across ride-hailing, delivery, and other gig work apps.

Workers for Taskrabbit, a platform where users hire independent contractors for yard work, home repair, and other physical tasks, earned the highest hourly pay rate at $38.

Spark, Walmart's delivery service, took second place at $23 an hour, with Uber just behind at $22.

DoorDash's hourly pay was $11, the lowest of the apps Gridwise analyzed.

Some companies say their workers earn higher hourly rates than Gridwise's estimates suggest. A Taskrabbit spokesperson said that its gig workers earn $49 an hour on average, although earnings vary by location. Uber said last year that the company's drivers earn $32 per hour while actively working on the app.

Gridwise compiled the estimates for its annual gig mobility report, released last week. The hourly pay data includes base pay, bonuses, and tips that workers received.

The data show that the best-known gig services don't always offer the best pay for workers, Ryan Green, CEO of Gridwise, told Business Insider.

Walmart launched its Spark delivery service as a test in 2018, years after competitors such as DoorDash and Uber Eats. Spark drivers pick up or shop orders at Walmart stores, helping the retailer grow its delivery business quickly.

"They just snuck up on the market and have rapidly grown into this space," he said.

Ride-hailing fares have risen faster than driver pay

Some gig workers have told Business Insider that it's harder to make money on apps like Uber and DoorDash than it was several years ago, due to higher competition and lower pay rates.

Most gig workers are responsible for their own costs, such as car maintenance. As a result, some gig workers have decided to accept only the trips that pay them the most for their time.

The price of gas, which has shot up in the past two weeks after the US started a war with Iran, is the latest cost pressure on ride-hailing drivers.

Uber and Lyft increased prices last year — and passed on a fraction of that hike to the drivers who make their businesses possible.

From December 2024 to December 2025, average customer ride prices on Uber and Lyft rose 9.6%, according to Gridwise. Over the same period, driver gross pay per trip increased 3.6%, and gross pay per hour rose 4.1%.

"We saw a modest increase on the driver side, and a much more substantial increase on the pricing side," Green said.

Last year, Gridwise found that weekly pay on most ride-hailing and delivery apps fell in 2024.

Delivery workers for services like DoorDash also saw an increase in per-hour pay last year — 3.2% — though their working hours on the platform rose about 17%, according to Gridwise.

Were you a gig worker in 2025? Business Insider is gathering information on gig worker earnings for a coming story.

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• Travis Kalanick launches Atoms, a new venture aiming to build a "wheelbase for robots."
• Atoms wants to build a platform for specialized industrial robots, not humanoid designs.
• Atoms is acquiring Pronto, an autonomous vehicle startup founded by Anthony Levandowski.

The former Uber CEO is venturing into robotics.

Travis Kalanick announced that Atoms is out of stealth mode and expanding beyond food delivery infrastructure into industries such as food service, mining, and transportation.

The ex-Uber CEO published a 1,600-plus manifesto of his company on Friday.

"When I told my friends, family, and colleagues about my plans for what was next, they were really excited that I was 'coming back,'" Kalanick wrote on the website for the new venture.

"The thing is, I never left."

Kalanick did not immediately respond to a request for a comment.

In an interview on "TBPN" on Friday, Kalanick told show hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays that he will be folding his ghost-kitchen startup CloudKitchens into the new venture, a detail that is also mentioned on Atoms' website.

Atoms' webpage says the company plans to build a "wheelbase for robots," a platform designed to power specialized machines rather than humanoid robots.

"At Atoms we make gainfully employed robots — specialized robots with productive jobs that bring abundance to their owners and society at large," Kalanick wrote on the website.

Kalanick said on "TBPN" that the company will focus on practical industrial systems instead of humanlike designs, and that the venture was just renamed as "Atoms" from "City Storage Systems" today.

"We've been in stealth mode for eight years," said Kalanick. "Employees were not allowed to put the name of the company on their LinkedIn. We have thousands of employees."

"Humanoids have their place, but there's a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient, sort of industrial-scale kind of way, which is sort of where we play," he added.

According to Kalanick, Atoms is close to acquiring Pronto, an autonomous-vehicle startup focused on industrial and mining sites, founded by his former Uber colleague, Anthony Levandowski.

Uber didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kalanick's partnership with Levandowski would be the reunion of two of the most infamous Uber alums.

Levandowski did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kalanick co-founded Uber in 2009 and was its CEO until 2017, when he resigned after facing immense investor pressure stemming from reports of a toxic work culture and multiple clashes with regulators.

Levandowski, an alum of Google's self-driving project that is now Waymo, was brought into Uber in 2016 after the ride-hailing giant bought his self-driving trucking outfit, Otto. In less than a year, he was fired from the company after Google sued Uber, accusing Levandowski of stealing trade secrets from the self-driving project. Uber settled with Waymo, but Levandowski was convicted in a separate criminal case in 2020 of one count of trade secret theft.

Levandowski was later pardoned by President Donald Trump before he even began serving an 18-month prison sentence.