[isatty]

It just does not work that way. I was an SRE at a similar company. You need driver locations, passenger locations, cost calculators (including ML models), ads serving, respect user preferences, geofencing, ride sequencing, analytics, compliance, fraud detection (you'd be surprised at the amount of fraud and clever tactics people employ). This is just a very minimal set of services (I'm guessing <10% of what you need) and you need to run this somewhat reliably.

Cost of revenue in just terms of infrastucture was measured in $/ride and minimizing it reliability is difficult, especially if you're a fast growing startup and on cloud providers. Unfortunately, if you're a fast growing startup you also don't usually run bare metal (even though I'm a fan of colo/OVH/Hetzner).

Don't forget that money used to free, with the way interest rates and investors were. It's far more difficult cutting down, than it is to throw money around, obviously.

[DeathArrow]

You need all of that if you try to complicate things. Otherwise you can get 90% of the money for 10% of the effort.

You can have a fixed rate. Fraud detection is a problem that thousands of apps requiring in app payments solved it somehow.

You don't need to have 1 million features, you only need to have the features demanded by the people who will make you most of the money.