Last week Uber sent me 178 offers.
Two nights. I was tired by the second hour both times. The offers kept coming anyway.
Every one of them showed a number that looks like a wage. $22 an hour. $18 an hour. $15.77 for 50 minutes. Your eye does the same thing it does with any job: you compare it to what you’d accept to stand somewhere and get paid.
That comparison is the trick.
If a warehouse pays $18 an hour, $18 is what hits your account. The building does not then send you a bill for the electricity, the forklift, and the roof. You do not subtract the cost of showing up from the rate before you decide whether the shift was worth it.
On an Uber offer you do. The $18 an hour is the fare divided by the minutes on the card. It has not paid for the gas, the tires, the brakes, or the miles you drove to the pickup and will drive home after. Those come out of the same fare. Until you subtract them, you do not know what the hour paid you. You only know what it paid Uber’s side of the screen.
The pieces you need for that subtraction are on the offer, but they are not in one place and they are not in the form you can use while you are moving. Pickup miles. Trip miles. Minutes. The speed those imply. What the car costs you per mile. What you already decided you need to keep. Ten seconds, four offers deep, tired, and you are not going to assemble it correctly every time. I don’t.
So I set the line when I am not driving. What the car costs. What I need left per hour. The zones I will not take. Then the app runs that same check on every offer and gives me one answer. Cleared or not. I hear it. I tap or I don’t.
Last week the line refused 109 of the 178 offers. Most of them looked like ordinary work. One was $15.77 for 50 minutes. Another was $10.01 for 38 minutes. Both would have looked fine if all I had compared was the rate on the card to a wage. Neither cleared once the car was paid.
We don’t claim this made the gross bigger. No app can. The fares Uber sends you are the fares Uber sends you. What the line does is narrower and more useful: it marks the offers that meet or beat the rules you already set, and it tells you to turn the rest down. That is how the money you actually take home stays as good as, or better than, the number you decided you needed before you started the car.
The Beta
I'm opening PuddleJumper to a small group of drivers for closed beta
testing. I'm not looking for people to rubber-stamp the app — I want
drivers who will push it, break it, and tell me what's wrong.
In exchange, the first 20 drivers to complete beta testing get
lifetime access to PuddleJumper's core features. Free. Forever.
Not a trial. Not a discount. Free forever.
If you drive for Uber, run Android, and want to stop staring at your
phone every time a ping comes in — this was built for you.
I won't drive without it. You might feel the same way.
→ Claim your beta spot at puddlejumper.io