[quantumhobbit]

14 cents per ride is nothing! Maybe 1% of the cost of a ride.

Maybe they could save a bunch by colo or something else. But would 14 cents per ride really matter at all for their competitiveness. I’m not going to notice a 14 cent difference even if I do bother to price compare Uber with Lyft.

This is a VC fueled market. It isn’t really about small margins of this size.

[ceejayoz]

It may be 1% of the cost of the ride, but it's likely a substantially larger part of the profits of the ride.

Lyft lost a billion dollars on $2B of revenue in 2018.

[isostatic]

So saving $8m a month, or $100m a year, isn't going to turn that round.

[ceejayoz]

Cutting 10% of losses is hardly something to sneer at.

[isostatic]

If you're still losing $100m a month you have bigger problems then saving a couple million in infrastructure costs.

Moving from AWS, or doubling AWS spending, will make no difference to the company's viability, it's not worth the time in meetings to discuss it.

[slededit]

Man this industry is crazy. Most traditional companies fight hard to gain even 1% in net margin.

[isostatic]

Most traditional companies are based on having revenues higher than costs.

dotcom v3.0 companies are all about the potential and cornering the market. Amazon was exactly the same - it was founded in 1994 but didn't make a profit until 2001.

[ivalm]

More like 5% if they cost costs to 0. But realistically they can cut costs by maybe half.... so you're taking significant risk for cutting losses by... 2.5%?

[tdb7893]

You wouldn't be able to cut all of it. Also making those major infrastructure changes are really expensive.