Urban Company Native M3 Pro Review | 3 Year Filters, Worth It?

The Urban Company Native M3 Pro is the cheapest RO water purifier to own in India over nine years: nothing to pay for the first three, then a ₹7,000 filter kit that renews the warranty for three more. Buy it over the cheaper Native M3 only after checking that Urban Company services your pin code, because a three year filter cycle means you will not discover a weak service network until you badly need it.

It is the first RO purifier we have used that asks for nothing at all in normal use: no service visit at month eleven, no filter kit, no technician in the kitchen explaining why the AMC has gone up again. After two months the hardware delivers on that.

Who the Native M3 Pro is for

The Native M3 Pro suits anyone in a city or large town with Urban Company coverage who is tired of the annual filter treadmill, and it handles high TDS borewell supplies particularly well, since the filters are rated to 2,000 TDS and the warranty does not narrow at high hardness the way most AMCs quietly do.

If you live in a village or a small town where the work goes to a third party technician, think much harder. A purifier that needs no service for three years is wonderful right up to the day it does need service.

How we tested

We ran two machines on two different supplies for over two months. The Native M3 Pro was plumbed to a municipal line measuring around 300 TDS at the inlet, and the Native M3 to a borewell supply at around 750 TDS. Output TDS was checked against a handheld meter rather than the on-board display, reject water was collected and measured by volume to work out the recovery rate, and tank fill times were taken with a stopwatch.

Native M3 Pro price and what the extra ₹3,000 buys

The extra ₹3,000 buys three things: a food grade SS 304 tank carrying a ten year warranty instead of a food grade plastic one, the dot matrix display, and the DualFlow Mineraliser in place of the Health Booster cartridge that Native has used since the M1 Pro. Everything upstream of that, the filters, the pump, the flushing logic, the app, is the same machine.

The Native M3 Pro launched at ₹25,999 and the M3 at ₹22,999, but street prices move constantly. We have seen the M3 Pro at ₹22,000 with an HDFC credit card offer, and the M3 drops too, so check both on the day you buy rather than trusting any review’s figure (including this one).

Pros and cons

What we like

Two months in, it has asked for nothing. No alert, no prompt, no filter counter creeping toward zero in the corner of a screen. Every other purifier we have lived with starts nagging inside a year, and the absence of that is the single best thing about owning this machine.

The water tastes the same as it did on day one. Both units, both sources. Taste is usually the first thing to drift as a mineraliser ages, and the SS 304 tank on the Pro adds no plastic note of its own.

Installation is slow because it is being done properly. Both units took ninety minutes, and the technician drilled four holes in the wall rather than the usual two. Input pressure check, tube routing, seating the filters, Wi-Fi pairing, two full flush cycles after the tank fills, then the app setup. That is longer than any purifier we have had installed before, and on a machine meant to run untouched for three years it is the right way round. Block out an afternoon rather than booking it for a Sunday evening.

The preset modes actually get used. Glass, bottle and free flow sit on the touch panel, and free flow is the one that earns its keep when you are filling a cooker or a large vessel rather than a bottle.

Native is not a fly by night brand. The machines are made in India, more than four lakh Native purifiers have gone into homes since the M1 and M2 arrived in 2023, and Urban Company listed on the NSE and BSE in September 2025. When a warranty runs three years, who is standing behind it matters as much as what it says.

What we did not like

Service is the real variable. Urban Company runs its own technicians in the larger cities and hands the rest to partners. Before you pay, open the app and try to book a water purifier service at your address, and if nothing comes up, ask locally. With a three year filter cycle you will not find out whether your area is covered until you badly need it to be.

There is no drip tray. The M2 had one. The M3 Pro has a touchscreen, three dispensing modes and a display that will tell you the outside temperature, but nothing to catch the spill. Urban Company says it will sell one as an accessory and has not announced a price, which on a ₹25,999 appliance stings more than it should.

Dispensing slows during a power cut. The machine keeps working on its internal battery and nothing shuts down, but the flow drops noticeably: a bottle that takes fifteen seconds on mains takes about thirty on battery. Annoying, not disqualifying.

Design, display and the app

The Native M3 Pro’s dot matrix display is the best implementation we have seen on an Indian water purifier, and it is the clearest reason to pay for the Pro over the M3. It greets you, shows tank level, shows the volume as it pours, flags filter status and errors, and displays a live TDS range rather than one invented number (TDS moves, so a range is the honest way to show it). That range tracked our handheld meter closely, which is more than we can say for the Atomberg Intellon, where the screen and the meter regularly disagreed.

Volume measurement is accurate too. Bottle mode is set to one litre and fills one litre, near enough that we stopped checking after the first week. The M3 gives you none of this, only indicator lights.

The machine itself is good looking in piano black, slightly bulkier than the M1 and M2 because the filters inside are physically larger, though at 8.5 kg it is not heavy for the class. Above 30 psi inlet pressure you will need a reducing valve, same as every other RO.

Wi-Fi is needed once, at setup, and a mobile hotspot will do. After that it runs normally offline, though the app stops updating, so reconnect once a month and nothing is lost. The app is the best part of owning a Native: filter health, TDS history, preset volumes for glass and bottle.

Purification: what actually changed from the M2

Nothing in the Native M3 Pro’s purification chain is new. What changed from the M2 is the size of it, and the sizing is what buys the three years.

Ten stages on both models. External pre filter for visible dust, sediment filter, pre carbon for chlorine and odour, RO membrane for heavy metals and fluoride, RO Life Booster to keep calcium and magnesium from scaling the membrane, the mineraliser, post carbon with copper charge for taste, and a UV LED inside the tank.

The sediment filter is 66% larger than the M2’s and built in four layers at 40, 20, 10 and 5 micron, so the coarse material is caught in the first layer and the fine layers stay clean for longer. Filter life went from 12,000 litres or two years on the M2 to 18,000 litres or three years here. For a family of four or five, cooking included, three years arrives well before 18,000 litres does.

A 120 psi diaphragm booster pump does the pushing, where most brands fit 60 to 80 psi. That extra pressure lets Native run a tighter restrictor (which is what lifts the recovery rate) and removes the need for a separate pump in low pressure homes.

Smart Rinse is the other piece. Every RO flushes the membrane when the tank fills, to stop salts settling on it, but Native reads input and output TDS and flushes only as long as the water requires: seconds on soft water, longer on hard. You hear it doing this (less than the M2, thankfully). During normal filling and dispensing it is silent.

How does Native calculate filter life?

How much water does the Native M3 Pro waste?

The Native M3 Pro recovers around 60% of the water it takes in on a low TDS supply, so roughly 0.7 litres go to drain for every litre purified. On our 300 TDS municipal line it gave 40 ppm at the tap. On a 750 TDS borewell supply the M3 gave 90 ppm and rejection rose to roughly one litre for one litre.

Every RO wastes water and this one is no exception, but that is still better than the two and a half glasses per glass that a conventional RO throws away, and it is in the same territory as the Pureit Eco Water Saver, which is the only other machine we have tested that takes recovery seriously.

Below 500 TDS the machine is genuinely frugal, above 700 it is merely reasonable, and either way you should keep a 20 litre can under the reject line.

Minerals, alkaline water and the TDS argument

You are not getting meaningful minerals from any water purifier, and no alkaline claim changes that. A glass of milk carries about 300 mg of calcium and an adult needs roughly 1,000 mg a day, a gap no amount of drinking water will close. If your joints ache, look at your diet and your vitamin D, not your TDS meter.

The DualFlow Mineraliser is still the M3 Pro’s headline feature, and it does something real. In an ordinary mineraliser all the water crosses one bed, whereas here it enters from two sides, so dosing stays even as the cartridge ages and the taste holds across three years rather than three months. The M3 uses the older Health Booster in a larger size and the water tastes fine, so treat this as a refinement rather than a reason to buy.

What matters is not how much is dissolved in your water but what is dissolved in it. Water at 150 TDS made of flouride, chloride and nitrate is worse than water at 30 TDS carrying calcium, magnesium and copper.

Alkaline claims deserve the same scepticism, since there is no good evidence that drinking alkaline water does anything for a healthy body.

This is where an RO stops being optional. The CGWB’s Annual Ground Water Quality Report, drawn from 15,259 samples, found nitrate above the 45 mg/L limit in 19.8% of samples and across roughly 56% of India’s districts, and fluoride above 1.5 mg/L in 263 districts. Check your own area on our groundwater quality tool first, because if your supply really is clean at 150 TDS you should skip RO and buy a UV UF machine.

What does the Native M3 Pro cost to own over nine years?

Nine years of Native M3 Pro ownership costs ₹14,000 in filters against roughly ₹32,000 to ₹36,000 for a typical AMC based RO, so the genuine saving is ₹18,000 to ₹22,000. Urban Company’s own chart claims ₹26,000, and that figure is optimistic.

The Native half of the sum is sound: ₹0 for three years, ₹7,000 for the filter kit at year three, ₹7,000 again at year six. That kit is a filter replacement rather than an AMC, and paying it renews the unconditional warranty for another three years.

Atomberg comes closest at ₹4,500 for two years, and Aquaguard’s four year claim still has nothing solid behind it.

Native M3 vs M3 Pro: which one to buy

Buy the Pro. Three things separate the Native M3 Pro from the Native M3: an SS 304 tank with a ten year warranty instead of food grade plastic, a dot matrix display instead of indicator lights, and the DualFlow Mineraliser instead of the older Health Booster. Purification, 6 litre tank size, filter life and warranty are identical.

At full MRP that is ₹3,000 for a better tank and a screen, which is defensible. At sale prices, where we have seen the Pro land at ₹22,000, it stops being a decision at all.

Native M3 Pro specifications

Frequently asked questions