“The most unusual request?” ponders Anya Portnik, the chief executive of iwantaPA.com , a start-up based in London’s upmarket Park Lane. “That would be the investment banker that employs us to read a story to his daughter every evening, for an hour, in French.”

Welcome to the world of “person-to-person outsourcing”, where the cash-rich time-poor use the web to outsource those irksome personal tasks – booking holidays, tracking down prospective life partners, educating children – that threaten to upset their precarious work-life balances.

According to Evalueserve, an India-based research firm, the market for outsourced personal services, where people hire remote “Bangalore butlers” and “time finders”, was worth more than $250 million this year. It is expected to hit more than $2 billion by 2015.

“It probably saves me a couple of hours a week. More, recently, in the run-up to Christmas,” says Caroline de Courreges, an American expat who works 11-hour days for a fund of hedge funds in Mayfair and outsources her personal administration to AskSunday. com, an outfit that looks after the tiresome jobs that plague high-flyers as much as mere mortals.

“I use it via my BlackBerry for making restaurant reservations and booking flights mostly,” she says. “The little things that everybody could do, but take up the ten minutes here, ten minutes there that I just don’t have.”

AskSunday, which channels work to sites in India and the Philippines, charges $29 (£14.60) a month for its basic package. That buys access to a “24/7 personal assistant”, accessible on the phone or via the web for up to 30 tasks a month.

Avi Samudrala, the former investment banker turned private equity staffer who co-founded the company, says that there is no typical customer. “I use the laptop analogy,” he says. “What a schoolkid, a student and a Wall Street analyst are going to use it for are very different.” But he does split up the broad classes into which AskSunday’s thousands of customers fall.

Average urbanite tasks include tracking down consumer goods – from “the hottest Manolos to a shirt for tomorrow’s board meeting”. For those too busy to engage in retail therapy, Sunday will track down the best prices and place an item on hold. Call bridging – where the site calls a doctor, gas company or telephone provider and stays on hold until the right person is on the other end – is pitched at the same set.

Meanwhile, soccer/yoga moms are likely to use the service to find a handy-man, a gardener or a qualified baby-sitter. Finally, baby boomers/zoomers are expected to ask Sunday to assemble their bespoke holidays and to find the “best living arrangements for ageing parents”, taking care of “emotion-filled and time-consuming research”.

The way for these personal services was paved by the shift in recent years to the outsourcing of business pro-cesses, in which banking call centres and the like are farmed out to lower-cost countries. Despite reservations about whether person-to-person outsourcing can tap the same benefits of scale, AskSunday, which launched this summer with backing from angel investors, is a leader in a crowded field.

Sites such as DoMyStuff.com provide a marketplace where freelancers can find clients. “You can find someone to do ANYTHING on DoMyStuff. com,” it promises. “Picking up dry cleaning, mowing your lawn and cooking your dinner are examples of chores you can post.” Live requests on the site range from “find daycare” to “expand my business”. Guru.com, another marketplace site, boasts more than 625,000 vendors and freelancers, more than 60 per cent from low-wage countries.

Meanwhile, amid myriad specialist sites, RentACoder.com, based in Florida, and GetAFreelancer.com, in Sweden, specialise in accessing cheap computer programmers. Online tutoring services, such as Transtutors and Tutor Vista, offer virtual teachers for school and college students.

Along more prosaic lines, SurePrep allows individuals and small companies to outsource accounting work – tax returns, for instance. The Big Four accountancy firms have been farming out tasks to India for years. Making labour-wage arbitrage available to individuals represents a democratisa-tion of the process, Evaluserve says.

IwantaPA, which Ms Portnik launched this summer, differs from many of its peers in eschewing offshore labour. Instead, all the work is done in the UK. The elevator pitch behind the business is the same, however. “Clients don’t have to hire anybody – there’s no PAYE tax to sort out, no hassle, no management,” she says.

Users of the service can hire an exclusive personal assistant (PA) for £823 a month. Alternatively, a pay-as-you-go scheme charges £12 an hour or, if you buy in bulk, 16 hours for £129. The length of time a task will take can be decided beforehand.

The most outlandish request AskSunday has encountered? “We have plenty of people asking us to find them dates on Match.com,” says Mr Samudrala. “But there was also the guy who asked us to pull together a group of travel companions for a trip to Thailand . . . I’m not sure how that turned out.”