Uber/Seamless/Postmates/Airbnb or any other middleman service. There's no reason why they should be getting away with extracting 30-40% of the revenue for facilitating a simple transaction.
These companies are also taking a giant cut but still losing money. Granted they are spending money on things that an open source alternative wouldn't necessarily spend money on, but I don't think very many of them are anywhere close to being profitable even without the extra spending.
All of these companies are following the ridiculous 0 to 1 monopoly model of growth and are wasting a ton of money trying to capture any market that they can get their hands on. It's not sustainable and the gig workers are paying the price. There's no doubt that they're providing a valuable service that could have spurred growth for the middle class, but instead they're using VC money to undercut existing businesses in hope of building the next Google.
Craiglist is handling as much traffic as all of them with around 50 employees.
There's no reason why someone building an open solution couldn't work with the cities and get their endorsement.
I also know a few people at food delivery companies and they all take around 35% of each order.
My point is that you could have an open source version of these services that could be managed by local governments or not for profits.
That is the idea I guess.
> Their last quarter revenue was almost $4 billion, you can definitely serve millions of daily rides for way less than that.
How do you calculate this? Sure if you were just you with car, you could - but not sure this is exactly a workable business model without uber - if it was then people would presumably not use uber.
> My point is that you could have an open source version of these services that could be managed by local governments or not for profits.
You could have open source versions - but the source code is a small part of the operation - and I'm not sure why I would want to government to run it - or why people should not be allowed to profit from it. If the issue is that workers are being exploiter maybe a better option is to see if there is some reasonable regulation to be put in place or why there is such low demand relative to the supply of labour.
I'm not a 100% sure if I understand your question. What I meant was that you could run a marketplace web service like uber or airbnb for way less than they're spending now. The variable costs of processing those transactions approach 0 at scale, also would be practically free if someone wanted to host it themselves for their small town.
> You could have open source versions - but the source code is a small part of the operation - and I'm not sure why I would want to government to run it - or why people should not be allowed to profit from it. If the issue is that workers are being exploiter maybe a better option is to see if there is some reasonable regulation to be put in place or why there is such low demand relative to the supply of labour.
Yeah I agree. The OP asked about a good open source alternative and I think that this could work as an open source project and be deployed per town (or as a decentralized application).