Policybazaar vs Ditto vs RiskPe — Three Different Ways to Buy Insurance in India

Policybazaar is a marketplace, Ditto is a national digital advisor, RiskPe is a fee-based local advisory. All three are legitimate and regulated differently. Here is how each model actually earns, what that changes for you, and which one suits which kind of buyer.

Ask three people in India where to buy a health policy and you will get three different answers: compare it on Policybazaar, book a call with Ditto, or sit down with an advisor. These are not three versions of the same thing. They are three genuinely different business models, regulated under three different IRDAI licence categories, funded in three different ways. None of them is a scam and none of them is universally best. What differs is who pays the intermediary, and therefore what the intermediary is optimised to do.

This piece lays out the structural facts of each model so you can pick on something better than brand recall. We build one of the three, so read the RiskPe section with that in mind — the facts about all three are checkable, and we have linked sources throughout.

The three models at a glance

• Marketplace / aggregator — Policybazaar. You compare many insurers yourself on a platform, buy online, and the platform is paid by the insurer. Optimised for choice and speed.
• National digital advisor — Ditto. You book a call with a certified advisor who talks you through options at no charge, and the company is paid by the insurer when you buy. Optimised for education at the point of purchase.
• Fee-based advisory — RiskPe. You pay a professional fee for advice and ongoing support, and the advisory takes no commission from an insurer. Optimised for advice that has no product attached to it.

Policybazaar — the marketplace model

Policybazaar is India’s largest online insurance marketplace, founded in 2008 and operating as an IRDAI-licensed insurance broker. Its parent, PB Fintech, is publicly listed, which means its economics are unusually visible for this industry. In FY2025 PB Fintech reported operating revenue of about ₹5,761 crore and net profit of about ₹353 crore. In the quarter ending September 2025 the group recorded roughly ₹7,605 crore of total insurance premium, with the Policybazaar platform alone contributing about ₹852 crore of operating revenue.

That revenue comes overwhelmingly from insurers, in the form of commission and related fees on the policies sold through the platform. This is not a hidden fact or an accusation — it is the disclosed business model of a listed company, and it is how essentially every distribution intermediary in Indian insurance has been funded for decades.

What the model does well is genuine: breadth of choice, instant price discovery across many insurers, a purchase you can complete at midnight without talking to anyone, and enough scale to have negotiated products and service levels most individual intermediaries cannot. If you know what you want and mainly need to transact efficiently, that is a real advantage.

What it is structurally less suited to is the part that happens after the sale, and the part where the right answer is not a product at all. A platform paid per policy sold has no revenue line for telling you that your existing cover is fine and you should buy nothing today.

Ditto — the national digital advisor model

Ditto was built by the team behind Finshots and backed early by Zerodha’s Nithin Kamath. Its core offering is a free thirty-minute consultation with a certified advisor covering health and term life insurance, with an explicit no-spam commitment — no follow-up calls unless you ask for them. In an industry where the default post-enquiry experience is a fortnight of cold calls, that commitment is a meaningful product decision and it is a large part of why the brand is well regarded.

The regulatory detail worth knowing is that Ditto operates as an IRDAI-registered Corporate Agent (Composite), licence number CA0738 — not as a broker. Under Indian regulation those are different things, and the difference is not cosmetic. A corporate agent is legally an extension of the insurers it represents; a broker legally represents the client. A corporate agent also works within a tie-up cap: the IRDAI (Insurance Intermediaries) (Amendment) Regulations, 2022 raised the cap from three insurers to nine per category, where a broker has no such limit.

A broker legally represents you. A corporate agent legally represents the insurer. Both can give you good advice — but if the advice and the product come from the same revenue event, the incentive is doing some of the work.

None of this makes Ditto’s advice bad. By every public account the consultations are careful, unhurried and genuinely educational, and for a first-time term or health buyer that is worth a great deal. But the consultation is free to you because an insurer pays when you buy. The advice is excellent within a set of products the company can place, and there is no mechanism by which it gets paid for concluding that you need nothing.

RiskPe — the fee-based advisory model

RiskPe is a fee-based, zero-commission insurance advisory operating from Jaipur under Ryzpe Consulting Pvt. Ltd. The client pays a professional fee for the work — a policy review, a coverage gap analysis, help through a claim — and the advisory does not take a commission from an insurer for the recommendation. The published fee is on our pricing page; there is no version of our economics in which one insurer pays us more than another.

The honest trade-off is that this costs you money at a point where the other two models appear free. That is the whole argument, and it should be made plainly rather than dressed up: you are paying for advice because advice that is paid for by the person receiving it answers to that person. The version that suits you depends on whether the advice or the transaction is the hard part of your problem.

• A fee does not change based on which insurer you choose, or whether you choose one at all.
• "Keep what you already have" is a conclusion the model can afford to reach, and often the correct one.
• Support continues after the purchase, because no commission event has closed the relationship.
• Claim recovery is a distinct service rather than a goodwill gesture attached to a past sale.

For a direct, line-by-line comparison of just these two models, we maintain a separate page: RiskPe vs Policybazaar.

Which model suits which buyer

• You know exactly what you want and want it now, cheaply — a marketplace is the efficient answer, and paying for advice you do not need is waste.
• You are buying your first term or health policy and want it explained properly at no cost — a national digital advisor is a strong fit.
• You hold four policies from four sources and no one has ever looked at them together — that is an advisory problem, not a purchase problem.
• You run a business with commercial exposures, or you have a claim that has been rejected — you need someone contractually on your side and reachable by name.
• Your honest answer might be "buy nothing" — only the fee-based model can be paid for saying it.

The question that separates them

Every intermediary in this market will tell you they are on your side, and most of them mean it. The way to cut through that is not to assess sincerity but to ask one mechanical question: if I buy nothing today, does this person still get paid for the time they spent with me? On a marketplace and with a commission-funded advisor, the answer is no. With a fee-based advisory, it is yes. That single difference is the entire structural argument, and you can decide for yourself how much it matters for the decision in front of you.

It is also worth saying that these are not mutually exclusive. Plenty of people compare prices on an aggregator, get a policy explained by a digital advisor, and separately pay for an independent review of everything they already hold. Using one does not lock you out of the others, and no model has a monopoly on competence.

Further reading: aggregator vs advisor vs broker — the regulatory differences explained, why more Indians are moving from apps back to human advisors, and whether regulatory status matters at claim time.

If a rejected claim is what brought you here, that is a different problem from choosing where to buy — start with RiskPe’s claim recovery service or the rejected health claim guide.