
A recent elbow fracture put multiple weekly physical therapy on my schedule. Since driving with a fractured elbow is a bad idea, this means a lot more Uber and Lyft rides than usual.
But the offer that popped on my Uber app was perfectly timed. A ride pass gave me flat fares anywhere in the city, and defined the city as quite a large area.

The flat rate is $3.49 for Pool and $6.99 for UberX on any ride that would normally cost up to $20, and I could pick a pass in one of these two flavors: 20 of these discounted rides for $8 or unlimited rides for $12 for a period of 28 days. I picked the unlimited rides.

Today I thought a little bit more about how great saving $76 in single week is, and came up with these additional findings:
- I started using uber a lot more. Sometimes I could have walked or asked a friend for a ride, but uber was only $3.49…
- I stopped using Lyft. I always checked the price and wait times for both Uber and Lyft before picking one for my trip (did you know that you can see prices for both in the Google Maps app?).
With this offer, Uber increased my LTV (lifetime value) considerably, did an amazing job at retention, and hit Lyft right where it hurts.
Plus drivers also get happier and more loyal as this means more work for them.
That’s the winning formula for uber!

if you buy enough supply and demand, the marketplace may be able to manhandle liquidity to a point that it could sustain itself without the artificial subsidy
Uber can afford to lose some money with some of these ride passes. That actually seems quite a low price to pay for increasing usage, customer loyalty (again LTV for both the rider and the driver), and maybe even make their customers fall in love with the brand again.
But if you’re thinking this is unheard of, think again. This is a page right out of the Amazon Prime playbook:
Prime members shop on the site nearly twice as often — 25 times a year — as non-prime members. “Amazon Prime membership encourages much more frequent shopping, likely because the free shipping benefit knocks down a key barrier to buying online often and makes Amazon their first stop for online purchases,” Mike Levin, partners and co-founder of CIRP said in a statement.
Data from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners via the July 2017 article on Business Insider.
The Uber Ride Pass is a great example of what I’ve heard designers call borrowing from the next aisle. You apply incredible ideas from completely different markets to your business.
More food for thought? Some examples close to home:
- the cameras are already in your Tesla and you purchase the Autopilot feature at any time. Does that sound like an in-app purchase?
- if you prepay for self-driving capabilities on your Tesla you get a better price than when the feature is launched, but you’ll have to wait for its development to be done. Does that sound like Kickstarter?
Have a different perspective? Other examples? Feel free to share below in the comments.
Update: 2 days before my ride pass expired I got invited to buy another pass, which I did.


