(Situation in Germany)
It depends on whether you are driving for them as a self employed driver or an employee. As an employee you earn 9€/hour minimum, some get 10€/h .. tips are an extra of 0-5€/h .. you are required 60 hours minimum per month.
As a self employed rider you get 5.50€ per delivery, but have to pay health and social insurance yourself. Employees have to pay less than half of the total cost.
How much you sit around or compete with others depends on the shifts you take ..
It could be a pretty attractive job for someone that likes to take off-peak shifts and read or work on something else while having to do the occasional delivery in his home neighborhood.
It can get even nicer if one can log in from home. It does happen frequently, that no deliveries happen at all during shifts, so one really can focus on other projects while getting paid by deliveroo.
I honestly am surprised how deliveroo manages to keep the restaurants on board. They have to give more than 30% of the earnings to deliveroo, most restaurant owners are extremely annoyed and frustrated with the service and are already playing with the idea of pulling the plug again. Since recently deliveroo tries to force the cost for the paper bags onto the restaurants(13cents), which exacerbates the situation...
From an environmental perspective they are contributing to an enormous amount of garbage, the majority of containers are plastic and in the worst case styrofoam. As an example, riders sometimes have to drive by car for 5-8km because someone ordered a soup for 5€ (Plus 7€ to reach the minimum of 12€ and paid 2.90€ delivery fee on top of that).
This business model contributes to the convenience culture that we in the western world are celebrating and which is part-responsible for quite a few serious issues that we are now facing..
One thing deliveroo has going for them is that the people in charge are always very reasonable and friendly, treat their employees with respect and are quite forgiving. But I assume that this is simply because the whole system is very fragile and they know it. In my city there are always way too few drivers. It is apparent how desperately they need the drivers.
I was surprised to read about the funding, because i assumed the whole thing can't be sustainable in the long run.