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by londons_explore 3140 days ago
Their revenue was deposits made by users to use the service.

If every user has to pay $60 refundable security deposit to get started, and you can attract a million users to try your service a couple of times, you can quickly pay for a few thousand bikes.

The vast majority of users will then forget to reclaim their deposit.

OBike for example reminds users who try to refund their deposit that if they want to sign up again there will be a fee to pay. That discourages users from claiming the refund because they think "huh - I might want to use this again in the future, and if I do, I don't want to pay a fee".