Because of churn and driver recruitment incentives Lyft pays the driver more than it charges the rider. For example a new driver gets 80% of the fare plus $8 per trip in the first month. If you can pick up 155 people per week, Lyft also eats the entire cost of your vehicle. Also, Lyft is paying 100s of millions of dollars to Amazon and Google to run their app.
I'd be really interested to know what resources they are using in cloud and why it is so expensive. I don't disagree they need resources but 100s of millions seems a bit on the wasteful side.
It's running in hundreds cities in tons of countries with huge pools of drivers. The server costs alone are going to be big. Plus you have to hire and pay for really good reliability engineers. Any outages are going to cost you a lot of confidence, and a lot of money. This is a really big amount of data, more than most people realize.
