Lyft reported its third quarter on November 5 and launched a new membership the same day. The membership is the more interesting of the two.
Lyft Go costs $9.99 a month or $96 a year, exactly what Uber One costs. It includes DoorDash’s DashPass and pays 8% of the base fare back in Lyft credits, capped at $40 a month, which a rider hits at $500 of fares. Credits work on Lyft rides or DoorDash orders and expire after 60 days. There’s a $4.99 Core tier without DashPass. Existing DashPass members get Lyft Go free if they link accounts, and Lyft Pink members move over at their current price.
Compare it with Uber One, which pays 5% to 6% back on rides with no stated cap and waives Uber Eats delivery fees on its own platform. Lyft can’t build a food business to match Uber’s, so it rents DoorDash’s. DoorDash, which just agreed to buy Instacart, gets every Lyft member as a potential DashPass customer and Lyft gets a food half for its bundle without spending anything on couriers. Both companies are fighting the same rival, and this is the cheapest way to do it.
The quarter gives Lyft room to try. Rides hit a record 274 million, up 10%, and active riders rose 10% to 31.6 million. Gross bookings grew 17% to $5.6 billion and adjusted EBITDA jumped 47% to $204 million. Trailing free cash flow stayed above $1 billion for a fifth straight quarter. Revenue of $1.82 billion was up 8% but missed estimates, and the company posted a $9.7 million net loss after a $117.9 million charge for legal, tax and regulatory reserves, $69.1 million of it booked as lower revenue.
Q4 guidance calls for gross bookings of $5.74 billion to $5.94 billion and adjusted EBITDA of $188 million to $213 million. Lyft still expects more than a billion rides for the year.
The test for Lyft Go is simple. Uber One has years of habit behind it. An 8% rebate only matters if riders switch apps to earn it, and the $40 cap means the heaviest riders, the ones Lyft most wants, are the ones the offer rewards least.