[fakedang]

Most of it is marketing, fighting legal issues and attrition of goods delivered / compensation. And also the insane discounts they have to provide to stay ahead of the competition. Airbnb is somewhat immune, since their only major competitors are old school hotels.

[rich_sasha]

Right, so “discount” implies they subsidise drivers for the journeys? Eg Uber charges $1 per mile but driver receives $1.1 or sth?

The org bloat is quite staggering for what is effectively a taxi app.

[fakedang]

No no. I meant that the effective cost of a ride (paying contractor + tech costs + employee costs + marketing per ride) is $1 a mile, but they give a discount that makes it effectively $0.9 a mile, and doing this on scale is effectively making them run operations at a loss unless they have market monopoly. Even a duopoly situation is unfavorable for them.