None of these apps have successfully transformed into the Kayak of ride sharing, but their continued emergence points to one of the ride-share industries most significant challenges. Ride-sharing companies aim to compete on brand and service, offering better experiences and increasingly more thorough transportation options, including bikes, scooters and even rental cars. But to build their networks, they have competed on fares, offering riders ever cheaper prices in an effort to get them hooked. This price-cutting cycle has conditioned riders to look for the cheapest ride options.

Ride-sharing companies aim to compete on brand and service, offering better experiences and more transportation options. But to build their networks, they have competed on fares.

As private companies funded by loads of venture capital, Uber and Lyft can still afford to slash prices. But this time is coming to a close. As both companies gear up for initial public offerings in the next year, each must focus on becoming profitable. At the same time, they’re under increasing pressure to pay their drivers better. New York City regulators are considering establishing pay rules for drivers of Uber and other ride-hailing apps that would significantly increase their wages. “As [Uber] shifts toward an IPO, they have to charge riders more and/or pay drivers less in order to become profitable,” says Harry Campbell, author of the ride-share blog The Rideshare Guy, and an adviser to Bellhop.

So, it’s no surprise that the large ride-sharing companies don’t much care for these apps. They encourage the price checking cycle that the larger ride-sharing services wish to eradicate. For the most part, Uber and Lyft appear to ignore them. But as individual apps have become popular, ride-share companies can threaten to withhold access to their developer tools. An Uber spokesperson pointed me to the company’s developer terms of service, which forbid using APIs for price comparison.

Uber used this argument when it threatened to shut down Ride Fair in the summer of 2017, by demanding Ride Fair remove the service from its comparison app. A year earlier, Uber similarly threatened to restrict its tools for a group of Harvard Business School entrepreneurs after they launched Urbanhail; they cried foul, arguing that Uber’s stance was anticompetitive.

While Uber never officially followed through on these threats, neither group elected to continue developing their apps. When I reached Phillip Wall, one of the two developers behind Ride Fair, he said he hadn’t paid the annual $100 fee to make it available through Apple, but you can find it in the Android store. “Part of me is happy knowing there's a few thousand people who get some use out of it,” he wrote in an email.

But smaller ride-hailing apps embrace aggregator apps as an opportunity to spread the word about their services. And industry leaders in the United States might be more willing to embrace it in international markets where they still have smaller footprints and need to figure out how to expand. That’s why Campbell has signed on to Bellhop as an adviser. “There's a huge incentive for competitors to partner directly with an app like this, especially internationally,” he says. It will get their service in front of riders’ eyes.

Ultimately, the reason these apps often don’t succeed has more to do with riders than the ride-sharing companies. One New York rider, Daniel Greenberg, downloaded Bellhop in the spring, before it had officially launched. “I’m a sucker for trying everything in the space,” he messaged me. He liked it, but he very quickly stopped using it. “Every time, Lyft was cheaper.” For now, Greenberg’s committed to Lyft—at least until the next app comes along, pointing him in the direction of even better deals.

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